Secondary stakeholder integration in the context of new sustainable product/service development; Empirical findings of European Cases

Integration of secondary stakeholders in sustainability oriented innovation (SOI) projects is important. The objective of this study is to delineate the required and acquired organizational capabilities of stakeholder integration for radical SOI projects by qualitative case studies. The results show that a distinction needs to be made between types of projects, and projects which co-innovate with other partners rather only involve them require and acquire higher level of organizational capabilities. The study implies that integrating multiple stakeholders is not just a matter of feeding additional information into SOI projects, but of changing the nature of these projects.