Exploring firm environmental development through creative communities: Capabilities-based theoretical issues and empirical case study in water sector

The main goal of the chapter is to analyze the organizational processes through which innovations and creative solutions for more sustainable activities are put together to create value in the long term from both a theoretical clarification and an empirical analysis. The study of organizational capabilities changes and sustainable business models creation is central to understand the factors triggering practices that go beyond environmental regulations compliance. Environmental innovations are a strong source of corporate environmental performance but they are implemented throughout a cognitive mediation we call "the managed creative communities." We implement an in-depth case study based on a multinational French firm in the water sector to illustrate our theoretical framework. The main results of our study show that firm creative inter-organizational communities create strong incentives to implement proactive environmental strategies that serve the environmental performance of firms, which is the result of the intrusion of public disclosure and voluntary private environmental management systems at the international level. In the studied firm, these characteristics are associated most of the time with explorative activities. Under these conditions, it enables firms to develop new internal and external capabilities that create favorable conditions for innovation based on ecological creativity.