Collaborative inter-firm relationships based on sustainability: Towards a new framework

Abstract

After decades of industrial decline, the models of firm competitiveness, green economy, green growth, are making the news. Indeed, there is a growing trend in the reversal of outsourcing or offshoring production of goods and services while inter-firm relationships are under scrutiny. A trend being reinforced by the global awareness on resources scarcity, to integrate in the processes the impacts of climate change and eventually reduce them, to prepare for growing energy costs. The linear economy and it's models of value creation based on trading margins of imported, outsourced, goods and services, global competition between companies, resources spillage, has shown it's limits. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.