Cross-sector Partnerships – Sustainability potential and development of non-profit and business cooperation

In an era of highly complex global problems, society faces so-called grand challenges like climate change, widening social inequalities, or major loss of biodiversity. Those challenges often impact numerous stakeholders with limited resources or no access to the root of the problem. Thus, critical problems that span sectoral boundaries are challenging to solve for the individual stakeholder within a single sector and call for partnerships between organizations from different sectors to face society's grand challenges. Partnerships between non-profit organizations (NPOs) and companies, in particular, can combine the knowledge and insights of sustainability experts with globally procuring companies and thus develop holistic solutions to environmental and social problems caused by economic activity. Academia has analyzed the collaboration of organizations in cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) for economic, social, and environmental welfare from some perspectives. However, numerous aspects of research and practice that are vital for better understanding those partnerships still need to be clarified. In the research field of CSPs’ value creation and development, this dissertation’s foci are derived from three specific gaps of knowledge: Against the background of the revenue-driven core idea of business organizations, scholars often highlight the relevance of CSPs to create value both economically and for sustainability, but actual economic value creation is rarely investigated. Moreover, the potential of CSPs to generate value for sustainability is investigated mainly for social CSPs and misses the potential of environmental CSPs. The management of CSPs that aim to develop better solutions for minimizing a firm’s environmental footprint is only slightly understood. Finally, the academic research regarding the development of CSPs and the temporal factor of their potential to reach both partners’ goals has a positive bias and left the topic of exit from partnerships mainly untouched. Sudden exits from partnerships bear risks for both partners; investigating and understanding exit and ending forms of CSPs is a critical issue for research and practice. This doctoral thesis addresses these knowledge gaps as it seeks to provide insights for academia and practice on the potential of business-nonprofit cross-sector partnerships for sustainability. The three main foci in the field of CSP research are the economic value creation from a consumer perspective, their potential for sustainability value creation in terms of sustainability-oriented innovations in supply chains, and the conceptual development of a CSP exit framework. In three chapters, this thesis investigates and gives answers to fill those gaps in research and places the findings in a broader scientific context in the framing paper.