Building Responsible Innovation Ecosystem, a new approach for inter-organizational cooperation

In order to develop more sustainable projects and deal with the current global environmental crisis, an increasing number of actors are willing to set up models of circular economy and need to develop cooperative approaches to handle the complexity inherent to these models. However, in management literature, the field of collective strategies and inter-organizational cooperation is relatively emerging and still need to be expanded, especially regarding sustainable development issues. So the underlying question we address in this paper is to determine which processes socio-economic actors rely on to build up these collective strategies and inter-organizational cooperation. Empirically, our research focuses on food waste reduction initiatives, using a qualitative method to study several projects which aimed at applying models of circular economy to the food production and distribution chain in Paris Region in France. This research led us to identify a new form of collective action that we outline by introducing the concept of responsible innovation ecosystem. This concept can be used in management to understand how heterogeneous actors can cooperate to develop innovative and sustainable projects.