The challenging transition to bio-economies: Towards a new framework integrating corporate sustainability and value co-creation

The transition to equitable and sustainable societies has become even more important for both scholars and managers. Bio-economies are based on renewable resources to build an economic system to be sustainably implemented to ensure cleaner, safer production and consumption, building on innovation; the main driver of firm success especially today. Considering sustainability which can lead to bio-economy, it is clear that social and economic aspects cannot be separated from each other. Therefore, also new firm practices and/or approaches are needed, able to encompass corporate sustainability issues and dimensions - social, economic, environmental, and time - as key issues, without forgetting the primary role of innovation. Past studies have proposed a new approach in the field of firm practices oriented to corporate sustainability. The present paper aims at making a step forward in this direction considering the value co-creation approach following a strategic perspective for the first time and putting forward a new framework explicitly integrating the key features of the recently proposed Sustainability Oriented Theory of the Firm into the value co-creation approach. Indeed, the proposed framework is able to show how the four dimensions of corporate sustainability can be fully encompassed in a model of value co-creation built around both innovation and the key features - inclusivity, generativity, linkability and evolvability - to start the co-creation movement on behalf the entire society and not only on behalf the firm goals. The proposed framework is therefore able to suggest to firms how to simultaneously manage value co-creation processes, corporate sustainability, and by this way contribute to bio-economies. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.