So You Want Your Supply Chain to Adopt Sustainable and Green Practices - How Complicated Could That be?
Chapter 4: So You Want Your Supply Chain to Adopt Sustainable and Green Practices - How Complicated Could That be? in Basile, Angelo, Gabriele Centi, Marcello De Falco, and Gaetano Iaquaniello, eds. 2019.
Catalysis, Green Chemistry and Sustainable Energy, Volume 179: New Technologies for Novel Business
19 Pages Posted: 8 Jul 2019 Last revised: 25 Nov 2019
Date Written: July 2, 2019
Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of the strategic tensions involved in persuading a Supply Chain to adopt Sustainable practices, with a particular emphasis on the apparel industry and Green Chemistry. These tensions arise from the conflict between a firm’s potential desire to use Sustainable practices to improve its competitive positioning (e.g., by creating a brand that is uniquely the Greenest brand on the market), and the reality that adopting Sustainable practices (e.g., Green Chemistry) will require the firm to cooperate with its Supply Chain and potentially with competitors, in ways that may undercut the opportunity for an enhanced competitive position (e.g., if everyone adopts the same Green practices, it is difficult for any individual firm to claim it is uniquely the Greenest firm). To some extent, this tension can be overcome by cooperation in ways that expand the market overall (e.g., take sales away from substitute products), while striving for competitive advantage against direct competitors (i.e., collectively this concept is called co-opetition, which is described in the last section).
Keywords: Co-opetition, Green Chemistry, Strategy, Supply Chain, Supply Chain Management, Sustainability
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