Download Project title: Academic keywords: Supply chain, sustainability

Project title:
Academic keywords:
Supply chain, sustainability, innovation, business model, cost optimization
Name of project proposer: Maisam Abbasi
Department:Business and Management
Academic description of the project:
Exploring and exploiting innovation have classically been considered as sequential processes while developed
inside the firm. Emergent opportunities in simultaneously exploring and exploiting innovation in interactions
among supply chains stakeholders; in special for gaining sustainability benefits have been rarely investigated.
As Vachon and Mao (2008) discuss, economic growth, positive environmental performance, corporate environmental practices, and environmental innovation are directly proportional to the richness of interactions –
what they call supply chains strength – in the industrial and commercial networks.
An obstacle in sustainable innovation in supply chain is changing logics of the current dominate business models that give priorities to short-term costs to increase profit margins by excluding environmental and social degradation costs. Customers also give rise to such obstacle while giving priorities to financial criteria such as
delivery time, price, functionality, and service-level ahead of environmental and social criteria such as recyclability, emissions, and working conditions or rights of employees.
Research objective is to investigate how Danish manufacturing firms can: 1) foster sustainable innovation capabilities by reconfiguring structure and flows/dynamics/interactions of their supply chains; 2) redefine logic of
their business models in their supply chains for creating sustainability value; 3) develop a new mechanism for
calculating costs by including environmental and social related ones.
This project will have an action research strategy (Saunders et al., 2009) from multiple case studies (Yin, 2009)
with a cross-sectional design (Bryman and Bell, 2004) by collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing data from multiple sources during its time frame. Below are preliminary research questions to be answered:
1) What are interactions in supply chains and how they can be classified?
2) How can structure and interactions in supply chains facilitate emerging sustainable innovation capabilities?
3) How should current business models be redesigned to create shared [sustainability] values and facilitate
emerging sustainable innovation capabilities?
4) How a new mechanism for calculating environmental and social degradation costs may look like?
This research project can create sustainability values for manufacturing companies, in special SMEs, by investigating innovative opportunities beyond classical intra-firm borders; i.e. in interactions, partnership, and networking with multiple stakeholders. The outcome would be learning and benchmarking capabilities in networks,
co-creation of a knowledge database, redesign of business models that may foster shared values by including
than excluding environmental and social degradation costs, and introduction of an index for measuring and
assessing sustainability as well as innovation performance in supply chains.
The project will also create strong research capacity at Aalborg University. It will include opportunities for industrial PhD studentships, postdoctoral research, benchmarking, collaboration with scholars and research institutes, as well as dissemination of research results through different communication channels. It can also even
bring networking opportunities among different stakeholders in industrial and business clusters. A concrete
starting point can be explored between AAU and MADE network partners.
Research results will be communicated through and published in several scientific and nonscientific channels
such as: peer-reviewed and open access journals; conference proceedings; seminars, courses, research projects workshops, and internal meetings by popular science papers, posters, and presentations; Book chapters
and reports; as well as tools of web 2.0, such as blogs, social networks and media, podcast and videocast.