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This study explores how sustainability outcomes of an eco-innovation evolves within a network context. It focuses how and why the outcome of an eco-innovation differ depending on the network foci, i.e., whether it is, as most studies, the dyad (e.g., supplier-customer) or if it is beyond the dyad (in this study, a triadic setting). The study is based on theories on business networks where the unit of analysis is a dyad and a triad. The purpose of the study is to explore how to assess sustainability outcomes of eco-innovations from different network perspectives, juxtaposing dyadic and triadic perspectives.

The paper presents a model that provides an empirical contextualization illustrating actor perceptions regarding sustainability outcomes of the same sustainability initiative (an eco-innovation focused on energy efficiency in offices) is contingent upon the unit of analysis. The model presented in this paper functions as a strategic instrument for companies, offering insights into various conditions and helping them grasp how sustainability outcomes differ based on individual, dyadic, and triadic viewpoints. It offers a framework to understand why effects may diminish with increased interconnectedness and why technology alone may fall short. The results suggest that the outcome might get negatively affected when the number of involved actors grows (in this study; expands to a triad). The results offer implications for future studies of eco-innovations, and it echoes the need to expand the study perspective in business networks beyond the dyad when addressing sustainability challenges.

In this emerging research paper, we introduce a project exploring the role of a commercial real estate property company called Mestro on enhancing the efforts of its clients to provide environmentally sustainable venues for their clients who also value environmentally sustainable business practices. Mestro provides real time energy usage and advanced reporting systems that enables commercial property owners to optimize tenant energy consumption. Through the lens of service dominant logic, we will perform a multiple case-based study to understand how Mestro, in collaboration with its commercial property clients and their tenants, creates an ecosystem where all parties co-create value for each other. In addition to the case studies, we will analyze actual energy consumption based on real data provided by the participating commercial property companies on tenant energy usage.

Triple bottom-line challenges are increasingly related to the long-term survival of companies. Both researchers and businesses understand that the transformation towards a sustainable future is dependent on green IS initiatives. However, companies base their decisions on business cases when investing in IS. Many of the required changes that green IS can offer—especially when it comes to new systems that require new business models—are not captured by business cases. This paper presents a model that widens the perspective on value creation. The presented Sustainable Stewardship Management Model (SSMM) allows companies that strive for a stewardship role to evaluate both existing and new forms of green IS by combining casual and effectual decision-making. The model is a result of a collaboration with several large Swedish commercial real estate companies, their tenants, and a non-governmental organization (NGO). The model will be tested in a follow-up project.

Purpose: To explore the emergent characteristics of IT portfolios in business-to-business (B2B) firms. The goal is to develop a model that clarifies what interaction capabilities B2B firms develop and to what form of IT this corresponds to.

Design/methodology/approach: We apply an a priori conceptual framework that is based on the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) Group's theoretical focus on business relationships. The framework depicts the business relationship as dealing with uncertainty and equivocality as well as building and upholding reliance and trust. We utilize a case study approach involving a focal firm and ten of its customers and suppliers. Building on 60 interviews, field observations and archival data, we analyze interviewee responses and the complementary data to evaluate the role of IT in supporting or automated various aspects of organizational relationships.

Findings: Results show how "high tech" and "high touch" relate to different interaction capabilities, which firms develop based on the characteristics of their business relationships. Although IT is associated with "high tech" and "high touch" interaction capabilities, some forms of IT are deployed to support the former, while other forms support the later. Both forms of technology-enabled interaction capabilities require investment, and firms must balance investment costs against the value created by improved interaction capabilities.

Originality/value: Our findings emphasize the interorganizational perspective (dyadic or network) rather than a solely organizational perspective for understanding IT portfolio development. This perspective is presented through an emergent tech-touch interaction capability model that shows how B2B firms can align their IT portfolio based on the specific characteristics of their business relationships.

Purpose – This study aims to investigates the possible gap between the logic of these information technology (IT) systems and industrial firms’ marketing practices. Industrial firms rely extensively on IT systems for their business. Design/methodology/approach – Based on the contemporary marketing practice (CMP) model, which depicts firms’ marketing practice as ranging from transactional to more relational and networked-based, the logic of IT systems and how users in industrial firms adopt them are amended to create an extended model. The extended model is used to analyze an in-depth case based on 63 interviews regarding one industrial firm’s business with customers and suppliers and how IT is utilized in this setting. Findings – Results show that industrial firms’ relationship-oriented business is poorly supported by currently used IT systems. This gap between the IT systems, which are transaction-focused, and industrial firms’ marketing practice, which is relationship-based, has severe effects on adoption and efficiency of IT systems. The marketers prefer local, non-integrated, IT with limited usefulness on an overall firm level while resisting the firms’ comprehensive IT systems. This forms an IT–marketing gap given that current IT does not match the marketing practice of relationship-oriented industrial firms. Originality/value – This study applies an extended CMP model in a novel way focusing one industrial firm, its customers and suppliers and the IT used in this setting. The study shows that all marketing practices of the CMP model can be found in one firm’s business, albeit one category, i.e. interaction marketing (a relationship approach), is dominating. The use of the CMP framework offers new and valuable insights into the fundamental cause to the industrial marketers’ limited use of integrated IT.

The theoretical research stream that depicts multinational companies (MNCs) as networked organizations has offered new insights on contemporary enterprises’ way of functioning. However, the majority of the research has focused on external embeddedness, that is, MNC subsidiaries’ local business relationships, and its impact on subsidiary organizational performance. This conceptual chapter addresses the lack of research focusing on internal embeddedness, that is, subsidiary relationships with headquarters and sister subsidiaries. Internal embeddedness is discussed from two dimensions: the internal production network and the MNC manager’s social network. The characteristics of each dimension and how they relate to earlier research, leads to a number of theoretical propositions. The chapter concludes with a discussion on how external and internal embeddedness relate, as well as how they may impact the subsidiary’s (organizational) performance.

Consumer-oriented firms (B2C) have grasped the benefits of modern integrated information technology (IT) systems as CRM and web-shops that allow them to capture, store, and manage consumer data to fulfill their expectations and needs on an individual and customized basis. This means that firms acting on consumer markets can use ‘high tech’ for ‘high touch’, i.e. using IT to met the consumer on a personal level. Based on the findings in a large case study spanning multiple business relationships (dyads) between buying and selling industrial firms we propose that the high tech/high touch logic is different at industrial markets (B2B). Here, industrial firms strive towards an increased use of interorganizational integrated IT systems (high tech) to lower interaction costs and at the same time increase the reliance in their business relationships. This is at the same time challenged by the employees’ preference for human interaction (high touch) as a mean to uphold trust and solve what they perceive as equivocalities. While consumer market’s high tech is based on the collection of consumer behavior high tech in industrial markets is much more a two-way street were partner firms work for integrated IT systems at the same time as the interacting employees appreciate the social dimension of business. This explorative study indicate that high tech and high touch in industrial markets is more a case of ‘either or’ rather that ‘and’ as in consumer markets. The study is explorative and presents a number of propositions that can be used for further studies.