The Journey of Sustainability Startups through Establishing Major Alliance Partners

As firms increasingly incorporate sustainability into their value proposition and business operations, collaborative efforts on sustainable entrepreneurship are expanding. We study a newly emerging form of such collaborations, where sustainability startups ally with large established firms for corporate social responsibility initiatives. Specifically, we explore through what kind of partnership formation processes that sustainability startups are able to establish their first major partnership with a large firm. While extant literature emphasizes that actively managing tensions between the multiple environmental, social, and commercial objectives is the key to success in sustainability startups’ engagement with external stakeholders, we examine a group of firms for which such tensions play a relatively marginal role. We empirically conduct case studies of five partnerships on food waste reduction projects. Our findings suggest that also in the absence of direct tensions between objectives, firms tend to leverage either sustainability or entrepreneurial orientation when attracting an alliance partner. We suggest that this pattern is less due to strategic behavior on behalf of the startups, but closely tied to their foundational premises. Our findings also suggest that startups with prevailing sustainability orientation benefit from the mentor role pursued by the established firms within their alliance relationship.