This article is the first to consolidate the state of scholarly research on stakeholder engagement in innovation management and entrepreneurship development. We hereby systematically review the ...relevant literature published over the past 27 years, and we integrate the various prominent research perspectives into a preliminary, multi-dimensional and integrative framework of stakeholder engagement; thus, interlinking the antecedent role of stakeholder engagement for innovation management and subsequent entrepreneurship development. Through this methodologically systematic review and framework development, we provide a more comprehensive and deeper understanding of the interaction between entrepreneurs and the various stakeholders, for enhancing innovation management and entrepreneurship development. In so doing, we consequently identify various research gaps and prescribe effective avenues for future works in this research stream. Conclusively, we discuss the implications of the stakeholder management perspective for the theory and the practice of entrepreneurship.
Innovation in business-to-business (B2B) contexts deals with highly dynamic, complex, and heterogeneous constellations of stakeholders with a diversity of goals, motives, and capabilities that ...further challenge successful management of B2B innovation processes and outcomes. Complex challenges, such as sustainability and digitization trends, push these B2B firms to embrace new innovation methods that help them manage disruptive change. Service design thinking has emerged as an innovation management practice emphasizing a human-centered innovation process of user interactions, creativity, and learning mindsets. In this article, we aim to evaluate the challenges and develop a research agenda on how service design can effectively enable stakeholders' engagement during the B2B innovation process. We argue that to advance service design opportunities for stakeholder engagement, we need to address the unique complexities and challenges of stakeholder engagement during innovation from a systemic and dynamic process perspective. From a systemic perspective, we zoom in on the building blocks of stakeholder engagement and address multi-level stakeholder engagement platforms (i.e., innovation networks). From a dynamic process perspective, we treat stakeholder engagement as an emerging process and zoom in on the temporal and relational connections and hybrid orchestration to allow for both structural and emerging stakeholder engagement during innovation. We develop a stakeholder engagement journey in which we integrate service and innovation stages and propose how service design activities can support and facilitate the aforementioned challenges and complexities. Finally, we identify concrete research questions and, accordingly, develop a research agenda for future research on stakeholder engagement in B2B innovation trajectories.
Stakeholder engagement in sustainability represents a powerful driver for value creation. Drawing from stakeholder theory, this paper explores how a firm with a proactive sustainable behaviour ...engages stakeholders in developing innovation and creating value. A longitudinal, single case study of the Salcheto winery was carried out. Since the late 1990s, Salcheto has been at the forefront of wine eco-innovation and it has played a key role in the development of Montepulciano (Tuscany, Italy) as one of the first sustainable wine clusters worldwide. The development of a sustainable wine culture is one of the firm's various innovations. In doing so, the firm has had to face three challenges - identity creation, legitimization and enhancement - and has engaged its stakeholders through three specific mechanisms (adoption and development; co-creation and diffusion; exploitation and contamination). This virtuous cycle of stakeholder engagement has resulted in value creation at a firm, stakeholder and local level.
A vibrant, resilient and productive agricultural sector is fundamental to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Bringing about such a transformation requires optimizing a range of agronomic, ...environmental and socioeconomic outcomes from agricultural systems – from crop yields, to biodiversity, to human nutrition. However, these outcomes are not independent of each other – they interact in both positive and negative ways, creating the potential for synergies and trade-offs. Consequently, transforming the agricultural sector for the age of sustainable development requires tracking these interactions, assessing if objectives are being achieved and allowing for adaptive management within the diverse agricultural systems that make up global agriculture. This paper reviews the field of agricultural trade-off analysis, which has emerged to better understand these interactions – from field to farm, region to continent. Taking a “cradle-to-grave” approach, we distill agricultural trade-off analysis into four steps: 1) characterizing the decision setting and identifying the context-specific indicators needed to assess agricultural sustainability, 2) selecting the methods for generating indicator values across different scales, 3) deciding on the means of evaluating and communicating the trade-off options with stakeholders and decision-makers, and 4) improving uptake of trade-off analysis outputs by decision-makers. Given the breadth of the Sustainable Development Goals and the importance of agriculture to many of them, we assess notions of human well-being beyond income or direct health concerns (e.g. related to gender, equality, nutrition), as well as diverse environmental indicators ranging from soil health to biodiversity to climate forcing. Looking forward, areas of future work include integrating the four steps into a single modeling platform and connecting tools across scales and disciplines to facilitate trade-off analysis. Likewise, enhancing the policy relevance of agricultural trade-off analysis requires improving scientist-stakeholder engagement in the research process. Only then can this field proactively address trade-off issues that are integral to sustainably intensifying local and global agriculture – a critical step toward successfully implementing the Sustainable Development Goals.
•Agriculture is central to the success of the Sustainable Development Goals.•Trade-off analysis allows the assessment of multiple aspects of sustainability.•“Cradle-to-grave” approach, from indicator selection to effective communication•Better engagement with stakeholders is critical to ensure policy relevance.
Energy communities (ECs) offer a promising solution for achieving sustainable and decentralized energy systems. However, the successful establishment and operation of ECs requires overcoming barriers ...that can hinder stakeholder participation. Existing research has primarily focused on incentives and motivations to join ECs, thus neglecting a comprehensive understanding of the key barriers affecting EC stakeholders in European Union (EU) countries. This paper aims to fill this research gap by identifying and ranking the barriers to joining ECs in the EU context with focus on Spain and Italy. To accomplish this, a framework of barriers was developed based on 20 in-depth interviews with diverse stakeholders of established ECs and a survey (n = 56). The barriers identified were categorized into four types: (a) financial, (b) regulatory and bureaucratic, (c) technical and practical, and (d) social and cultural. The analytical hierarchical process (AHP) methodology was employed to estimate and rank these barriers. The findings highlight that the most significant barrier categories are regulatory and bureaucratic, and financial. Specifically, regulatory complexity and legal limitations emerge as the top-ranked barriers among the obstacles identified to joining ECs by research participants.
•Energy communities are a promising solution for sustainable decentralized energy systems.•Joining an energy community faces financial, regulatory, technical, social barriers.•The article ranks these barriers using the analytical hierarchical process.•It provides insight of the barriers affecting all energy communities' stakeholders.•It discusses the main policy recommendations derived from the ranking of barriers.
•Stakeholder engagement in co-creation involves cognitive, emotional, and behavioural aspects.•Stakeholder engagement is driven by stakeholder-, firm-, and context-based factors.•Mechanisms that ...promote stakeholders’ interactions level co-creation processes.
Companies need to enhance corporate performance by stimulating the links between stakeholder engagement, innovation, and co-creation. Previous literature lacks a systematic and integrative conceptualisation of these factors, limiting our understanding of how to leverage stakeholders in innovation and co-creation strategies. Based on a systematic literature review (112 papers), this paper presents a discussion on the conceptualisations of stakeholder engagement, open innovation, and co-creation, compiles research gaps and further research directions, and propose a conceptual model for stakeholder engagement. The model is globally validated through a case study from 22 companies in the wine industry. Findings suggest jointly managing engagement in co-creation activities of internal and external stakeholders through several types of antecedents, accounting for engagement evolution across time. Among its limitations, this research excludes working papers under review and studies not in English. The model validation is circumscribed to ongoing co-creation processes involving internal stakeholders and distribution partners.
Despite the significant strides made in the customer engagement literature, the need to understand any marketing actor’s engagement (vs. merely the customer’s) is increasingly recognized. Therefore, ...the budding actor engagement (AE) concept, which is commonly grounded in S-D logic, describes any marketing actor’s engagement, including that of customers, firms, employees, suppliers, and so on. However, while S-D logic-informed AE offers important insight into actors’ mutual value creation, it largely overlooks the sociopolitical notions that (a) actors’ potentially diverging goals may see them act against (vs. pro) focal others’ interests and (b) different actors may extract differing levels of value from interactions, as advanced in stakeholder theory. Based on these gaps, we extend existing AE research by developing integrative stakeholder theory/S-D logic-informed stakeholder engagement (SE). We deduce five core SE tenets, from which we conceptualize SE as a stakeholder’s state-based, boundedly volitional resource endowment in his/her role-related interactions, activities, and/or relationships. We conclude this article by discussing important implications that arise from our analyses and by identifying avenues for further research.
Stakeholder engagement has grown into a widely used yet often unclear construct in business and society research. The literature lacks a unified understanding of the essentials of stakeholder ...engagement, and the fragmented use of the stakeholder engagement construct challenges its development and legitimacy. The purpose of this article is to clarify the construct of stakeholder engagement to unfold the full potential of stakeholder engagement research. We conduct a literature review on 90 articles in leading academic journals focusing on stakeholder engagement in the business and society, management and strategy, and environmental management and environmental policy literatures. We present a descriptive analysis of stakeholder engagement research for a 15-year period, and we identify the moral, strategic, and pragmatic components of stakeholder engagement as well as its aims, activities, and impacts. Moreover, we offer an inclusive stakeholder engagement definition and provide a guide to organizing the research. Finally, we complement the current understanding with a largely overlooked dark side of stakeholder engagement. We conclude with future research avenues for stakeholder engagement research.
Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) is a complex process involving various actors with deviating viewpoints, perceptions and approaches. This study identifies and explains different viewpoints in ...northern European MSP processes by contextualizing the different viewpoints of national maritime spatial planners, policymakers, scientists, consultants, and representatives of intergovernmental organizations who are involved in the MSP process. The Q Methodology, a method to study the subjectivity of participants, combines qualitative and quantitative approaches to explore people’s viewpoints has been utilized to identify the different frameworks in MSP. A total of five viewpoints have been conceptualized in MSP, based on 17 participants and 39 statements, that cover the whole range of MSP. Simultaneously, respective factor loadings of participants have been identified. This research proves that there seems to be a limited set of viewpoints among the community, despite the amount of stakeholders, their different backgrounds and origin. Results of this study could help to manage different or even conflicting viewpoints in MSP in the future.
External stakeholder engagement is crucial for delivering value to diverse stakeholders in inter-organizational projects, however, it is not straightforward to organize this in a way that adds value. ...The intra-organizational focus of previous research offers limited insights into the relevant roles, responsibilities, arrangements and activities in inter-organizational contexts. Moreover, comprehensive empirical studies of the phenomenon are rare. This study explicates how internal stakeholders organize external stakeholder engagement in inter-organizational projects. Our multiple-case study of two infrastructure projects in Northern Europe identified three organizing solutions based on governance, values and dynamism. While governance-based solutions provide an overall structure for organizing external stakeholder engagement, value-based solutions ensure genuine cooperation and dynamism-based solutions facilitate timely organizing. The study develops propositions that constitute a model of how external stakeholder engagement can be organized in inter-organizational projects. The findings have implications for project stakeholder management and mainstream stakeholder research.
•External stakeholder engagement is essential in inter-organizational projects.•Organizing external stakeholder engagement in a way that adds value is challenging.•We explored empirically how internal stakeholders organize external stakeholder engagement.•Three organizing solutions were identified based on governance, values and dynamism.•We developed four propositions constituting a model of how external stakeholder engagement is organized.
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