Transition towards sustainable competitivenessleveraging shared value in Catalonia

Resumen

Awareness of the urgent need to develop actions to promote the transition towards more sustainable economies and societies was already acute before the socioeconomic crisis precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In Europe this awareness was refected in the establishment of a New Green Deal by the European Commission in 2019, and in the integration of green and digital transitions as the core pillars of the new EU Industrial Strategy, launched in early 2020.1 The COVID-19 pandemic has created new challenges for the companies related to disrupted supply chains, temporary immobility of labour, and large falls in demand in many sectors. However, it has also demonstrated possibilities from new ways of working digitally and remotely and from changing consumption and production patterns that have potential to advance the sustainability agenda. Indeed, it is widely acknowledged that a key efect of this pandemic will be to accelerate further the twin digital and green transitions that were already shaping industry. This is explicitly acknowledged in the European Commission’s COVID-19 recovery plan, a key element of which is to convert the European Green Deal into an EU growth strategy that will both ‘repair’ and ‘prepare’ for the next generation.2 Over the coming years we can therefore expect both a large injection of funds and a range of experimental and radical measures oriented to promoting the sustainable transition of our economies and societies. This will be the basis of post-COVID recovery in Europe, and it ofers both large challenges and large opportunities to European and Catalan industry. The disruptive nature of such a profound transition – incorporating elements of resource efciency and circular economy, alongside automation, digitalisation and associated new business models – will require fast adaptation from frms, clusters of frms, and public administrations. A successful transition towards competitiveness models that are coherent with sustainability will be the key to sustained economic success. This scenario highlights the importance of several concepts that have started to take on signifcance in recent years. In particular, the concept of ‘creating shared value’ developed by Porter and Kramer (2011) ofers a framework to understand business competitiveness as consistent with actions that proactively push forward the transition towards sustainability. This is complementary with policy tools to manage sustainable transitions that have been developed from theories of ‘strategic niche management’ (Kemp et al., 1998, 2001; Geels and Raven, 2006) or ‘transition management’ (Kemp et al., 2007; Loorbach, 2010). Moreover, the infuential Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that provide the central focus of the United Nations 2030 Agenda ofer an important framework for measurement and action.3 The combination of these diferent approaches provides insight on the roles of frms and governments in building sustainable industrial competitiveness. It also highlights the role of intermediary institutions to promote the collaboration and experimentation required for successful industrial transition and modernisation, in what is a systemic context where the actions of any one actor have important interactions with those of others. In this regard, industrial clusters and the organisations that support collaborative dynamics within them have key roles to play. While these challenges are well acknowledged, there is a shortage of understanding around how the transition to more sustainable industrial competitiveness can be supported in practice. The aim of this study is to take steps in that regard through an applied analysis of Catalan industry. The overall questions that we seek to address are: (i) how Catalan industry is leveraging concepts such as shared value in practice to generate sustainable competitiveness models?; and (ii) how can policy further support these processes? To respond to these questions, this report is structured as follows. Chapter 2 sets the scene by reviewing the core concepts of sustainability and industrial competitiveness and sketching out the European context in which they are increasingly intertwined. Building on these conceptual arguments underlining the need for sustainable industrial transitions, Chapter 3 then explores the context for such transitions in four key ecosystems that are central for meeting sustainability goals: food, mobility, energy and digital. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on two key units of analysis for driving forward these sustainable transitions; companies and clusters. Chapter 4 explores the implications of the fusion of competitiveness and sustainability for business strategy, conceptually and then applied to a series of practical cases in the Catalan context. Chapter 5 explores the key role that the collaborative dynamics within clusters can play in supporting frms’ transitions towards sustainable competitiveness models, again both conceptually and through applied analysis of cases in Catalonia. Chapter 6 concludes the study with a set of implications and recommendations for competitiveness and regional development policies.