New Sustainable Product or Service development from the Perspective of Secondary Stakeholder Integration's Process

Integration of various stakeholder specifically secondary ones in sustainability oriented innovation (SOI) projects is important but complex. Thus, firms should possess new capabilities to successfully integrate the external entities in the SOI projects' process. Moreover, the firm learns how to integrate stakeholders in SOI over time by accumulating experiences. The objective of this study is to delineate the required and acquired organizational capabilities of stakeholder integration in the context of SOI. The study takes the successful secondary stakeholders' integration of radical new sustainable product/service as an empirical context for the qualitative multiple case study. The results show that a distinction needs to be made between types of projects, and that not all projects are equally require and acquire organizational capabilities. Projects which co-innovate with other partners rather integrate them require higher level of organizational capabilities for evaluating/selecting and planning the integration as well as effectively communicating with partners. Firms manage these challenges using several profound, sometimes structured mechanisms. The results show stakeholder integration foster firms, which co-innovate, through learning-by-doing and learning-by-interacting mechanisms. 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.