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Energy utilities play an important role in transitioning to a sustainable energy industry. Data on 8967 transactions by 19 European energy utilities from 1990 to 2019 illustrate when and how utilities invest in sustainable resources and divest traditional resources such as fossil-fuel plants. Utilities transitioning to sustainable energy have greater financial resources and experience with sustainability, are publicly owned, and access sustainable resources of international and inter-industry partners. Utilities adopt a diversified strategy of balancing sustainable and traditional resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how science parks (SPs) act as innovation intermediaries to facilitate university-industry research and development (U-I R&D) collaboration and how the SPs' roles influence the collaboration effectiveness. Data was collected from documents and interviews with 52 participants in 19 collaboration projects across four SPs in northern Thailand. This data is unique because it includes the perspectives of the SPs' project managers as well as those of the university researchers, firm owners and managers in a developing economy context. Our findings show that the SPs performed consulting, brokering, mediating, and providing resource roles and thereby enhanced the attributes of researchers, firms, relationships between partners and collaboration projects, to ultimately improve the success of the collaborations. The SPs in Thailand are not only property-based organisations that provide space and facilities for firms to locate in. It is the SPs' active involvement in the U-I R&D collaboration that contributes to its effectiveness. SPs in a developing economy thus evolve their roles to offer greater support to firms in low-tech industries. We also offer evidence of trade-off effects and show how the SPs' roles and attributes of firms, researchers and relationships can substitute for one another to create effective U-I R&D collaborations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental alliances are a common response to societal sustainability demands. In environmental alliances, firms collaboratively exploit and explore environmental technologies to address market opportunities while simultaneously generating positive environmental impacts. A striking idiosyncrasy is that in addition to economic value, environmental alliances generate two types of external value: environmental value from positive effects on air, water, land and biodiversity, and knowledge value from innovations in environmental technologies. Research on motivations for environmental alliances is dispersed and underdeveloped compared to the well‐established literature on motivations for strategic alliances that emphasize economic value. This study therefore develops a classification of motivations for environmental alliances by combining the literature on strategic alliances and that on environmental and knowledge value. The resulting classification includes motivations for environmental alliances to generate environmental and knowledge value as well as motivations to create economic value by internalizing environmental and knowledge value. A systematic review of 123 articles on environmental inter‐firm alliances identifies specific motivations to populate the new classification. We show that alliance partners are motivated to share sustainable resources, reduce sustainability risk, respond to stakeholders or invest in specific sustainable assets to generate external value. They collaborate to reduce costs or enhance competitive advantage, reputation or legitimacy to internalize external value. The resource‐based view, resource‐dependence view, institutional theory and transaction cost economics have not previously distinguished between motivations to generate and internalize external value. We extend their area of application from strategic alliances to environmental alliances, and thus beyond the exclusive pursuit of economic value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responsible management competences are the skills of managers to deal with the triple bottom line, stakeholder value and moral dilemmas. In this paper, we analyse how managers develop responsible management competences and how the competences interact with capabilities at the organisational level. The paper contributes to the responsible management literature by integrating research on absorptive capacity and organisational learning. By creating intersections between these disparate research streams, this study enables a better understanding of the development of responsible management competences. The paper is a systematic literature review on environmental competences, which are a type of responsible management competences referring to the managerial skills aimed at improving environmental sustainability. The findings demonstrate that managers who are able to recognize and acquire external knowledge develop environmental competences, and organisations capable of assimilating, transforming and exploiting knowledge develop environmental capabilities. The paper establishes that a dynamic and recursive relation exists between environmental competences and capabilities. Antecedents and contextual conditions specific to a sustainability context, such as eco-centric values and stakeholder pressures, influence the development of environmental competences. The study shows that environmental competences have a positive direct effect on environmental performance, and an indirect effect as a mediator between environmental capabilities and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study reviews literature on paradoxical tensions between value co‐creation and capture in interorganizational relationships (IORs). The purpose of this review is to make a re‐evaluation of the literature by engaging a paradox theory lens, thereby identifying factors that render tensions salient and factors that lead to virtuous or vicious cycles. This review of 143 articles reveals factors that make tensions salient; these relate to plurality (e.g. coopetition), scarcity (e.g. lack of experience with IORs), change (e.g. changes in collaboration scope) or combinations thereof (e.g. IORs in weak appropriability regimes). Results also uncover factors that resolve paradoxical tensions of value co‐creation and capture, thus spurring virtuous cycles (e.g. carefully mixing trust and contracts), as well as factors that promote vicious cycles, owing to the emphasis on either value co‐creation or capture (e.g. myopia of learning). This review also uncovers a new category of factors that may stimulate either virtuous or vicious cycles, depending on the extent to which they are enforced. This finding expands the value co‐creation–capture paradox resolution, and brings to light new dynamics in the paradox framework of dynamic equilibrium. The authors thus contribute by: (1) reassessing the existing literature and applying paradox theory to the well‐known hazard of value co‐creation and capture; (2) highlighting factors that amplify paradoxical tensions related to this hazard; and (3) outlining factors that solve the paradox by embracing its contradictory poles and factors that hinder paradox resolution by emphasizing either value co‐creation or appropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on how network-based incubation influences the performance of technology-based start-ups has recently grown considerably and provided valuable insights. However, at the same time this literature has become quite fragmented, inconsistently conceptualised, and theoretically underdeveloped. Therefore, this article uses three management theories to structure the literature, improve the theoretical underpinning and develop an agenda for further research. The management theories are the resource-based view, knowledge-based view, organisational learning, and social capital theory. We find that the network-based incubation literature has convincingly shown that network-based incubation provides start-ups with resources, capabilities, knowledge, learning and social capital. However, the influence of these intermediary benefits on start-up performance is ambiguous. There is a considerable opportunity to advance the network-based incubation literature with contemporary insights from management theories. We propose an agenda for further research on network-based incubation that leads to a fine-grained model of the mechanisms and impact of network-based incubation that goes beyond taken for granted assumptions about the positive impact of network-based incubation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses solutions for contractual hazards in the formation and operation of collaborations with start-ups. We suggest that venture capitalists (VCs) may serve as a mechanism to mitigate contractual hazards and act as a substitute for equity sharing in joint ventures. This article is to our knowledge the first to address the impact of VC on governance decisions for start-ups. We analyse 5405 bilateral collaborations from the SDC database for the period 2009-2014 and find that VC-backed firms are less likely to share equity in collaborations. In a subset of 564 VC-backed firms, start-ups are less likely to choose a joint venture as a governance structure in comparison with established firms. When firms are backed by a larger number of VCs, they are also less likely to share equity in a collaboration. This article improves our understanding of the effect of VC on governance decisions in inter-firm relations and presents evidence of a trade-off between joint venture equity and VC equity in the formation of collaborations. It also shows that this trade-off becomes even more substantial when syndication of VCs is present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on alliances has identified a variety of inter-firm antecedents of performance, including information and knowledge sharing between partners, shared partner understanding, and a focus on collective objectives. Recent studies have focused on alliance management capabilities (AMC) - firms' abilities to capture, share, store and apply alliance management knowledge - as an important antecedent of performance. This paper reviews 90 studies on AMC and makes two important contributions to the literature. First, the review provides an overview of and classification scheme for the different types of AMC to better organise the diverse empirical findings that have been presented in the literature. The novel classification distinguishes between general and partner-specific AMC and between AMC stored within the firm and within the alliance. Second, consistent with the dynamic capabilities perspective, this paper offers a more detailed understanding of why AMC improve performance, by highlighting the intermediate impact of AMC on alliance attributes. In particular, the review demonstrates how the different categories of AMC influence alliances in terms of information and knowledge-sharing between partners, shared partner understanding and the pursuit of collective goals. The review also demonstrates that these attributes improve performance. The authors note promising avenues for future empirical research that involve combining the classification scheme with research on the impact of AMC on alliance attributes and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European directives for the electricity industry prescribe the creation of a market for balancing electricity supply and demand. In this paper, we demonstrate that a market for balancing has not emerged in the Dutch electricity industry, and that, instead, the balancing transactions are governed by regulated, long-term contracts and a bidding mechanism. We explain the absence of a balancing market by using the framework of transaction cost economics, in which the efficiency of a market decreases with increasing investments in specific assets. The results of a questionnaire among the energy firms that supply balancing power in the Dutch setting show that these firms have invested in specific physical, temporal and dedicated balancing assets. The need for these specific investments to balance supply and demand does not only explain the absence of a market, but also the lack of participation by small firms in the balancing mechanism. We recommend several policies, such as stimulating technological developments for the storage of electricity and demand side management, which reduce these specific investments in balancing assets, and thereby stimulate the creation of a market and the participation of small firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The liberalization and re-regulation of the European electricity industries have been driven by the European Commission's attempt to create one internal competitive electricity market. The European electricity directives require the vertical separation of the European electricity firms to enable the introduction of market forms of governance. Transaction cost economics argues for the efficiency of vertical integration in this industry on the basis of the attributes of the transactions that are characterized by a great degree of asset-specificity and uncertainty. This paper poses the questions whether regulation has led to the prospected outcome of governance transformations to the market and whether and how the attributes of transactions adapt to the altered forms of governance. We answer these questions by analyzing the empirics of the Dutch electricity industry. We found that the market forms of governance did not emerge, the attributes of the transactions are relatively inert and that regulation at most has led to second-best governance solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European liberalising electricity industries are still heavily regulated. A prominent form of regulation is directed at the energy companies' forms of governance. European and national regulations prohibit the vertically integrated structures that characterised these companies for almost a century. Detailed rules on unbundling, independence of the transmission and distribution system operators, and network access influence to a large extent the type of new governance structures that are adopted. This paper takes the institutional organisation of regulation into account to explain the regulatory influence on governance changes at the level of the firm. Examples of the Dutch and French electricity industries illustrate that the new forms of governance are heavily influenced by the institutional organisation of regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]