Building responses to sustainable development challenges: A multistakeholder collaboration framework and application to climate change

The affirmation of open innovation and collaborative systems is enabling unprecedented opportunities to create business value while facilitating multistakeholder conversation on sustainability issues. In particular, platform‐based models are emerging as organization archetypes able to facilitate cooperative dynamics among industrial actors, policy makers, academicians, scientists, and citizens. In this article, we use interdisciplinary business management and collaborative innovation literature to build the conceptual framework of a multisided platform as a collaboration environment gathering actors willing to define responses to sustainable development challenges. We present five dimensions or “genes,” that is, the focus and strategic intent or orientation of the platform (what), the participating sides, actors and groups (who), the actions, flows and coordination mechanisms (how), and the value drivers, benefits and externalities (why), and the rules regulating the affiliation and interaction processes (governance). We also present and discuss 30 subtopics or management items that are associated with the five dimensions defined. We then apply the conceptual model to analyze a case in the climate change endeavor and to show how competitive and cooperative dynamics can be virtuously integrated to provide individual‐ and company‐driven responses to a timely socioenvironmental issue. The article provides a new perspective on collaboration to enhance social development, and it offers theoretical and practitioner insights for a broad interdisciplinary audience including scholars, practitioners, business, and platform managers.