Managing multi-stakeholder co-creation to address grand challenges: The role of paradox management capabilities

Addressing Grand Challenges such as disruptive sustainability require transformative innovations and policy frameworks that enable coordinated, systemic, multi-stakeholder co-creation. Yet, we have limited understanding of the capabilities needed to manage the paradoxical tensions that arise in multi-stakeholder co-creation networks. We make an original contribution by using an evidence base composed of 30 co-creation initiatives from 21 countries and 3 transnational initiatives, developed to address challenges relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, a Grand Challenge characterized, exactly like disruptive sustainability, by large scale, complexity, and uncertainty. Our findings advance paradox theory by articulating six higher-order paradox-management capabilities needed to manage paradoxes relating to two levels of transformative innovation, project co-creation and programme co-creation. For each of these higher-order capabilities, we identify more specific routine capabilities that allow partners to manage these paradoxes to achieve swift and successful co-creation for disruptive sustainability. We provide implications for policy and practice. • Addressing Grand Challenges requires coordinated, systemic, multi-stakeholder actions. • Multi-stakeholder co-creation networks need to manage numerous paradoxical tensions. • We analyse 30 networks at project and programme levels dealing with Covid-19. • We identify higher-order and routine capabilities to manage paradoxes in this context. • Different capabilities matter for managing paradoxes within programmes and projects.