ABSTRACT
The fourth category of organizational forms at the co-innovation level is the category of public-private partnerships. This organizational form enables commercial firms and governmental and nongovernmental organizations to co-innovate and work on substantive new practices. The distinctive characteristic of a sustainably innovative public-private partnership is its primary focus on creating a new practice that has ecological, social and societal quality. It searches for new ways to create a new sustainable modus operandi—or, to be more precise, modus co-operandi—for industry. The public-private partnership is an organizational form that is used to experiment and demonstrate and thus to show how the new sustainably innovative practice of the future can look. Firms and nongovernmental and governmental organizations that join these public-private partnerships become the leading innovators of industry and are often supported by national policy, funding programs and regulation. Organizations that do not join the sustainable public-private partnerships still have the opportunity to learn from them, look at them, study them and copy aspects and elements of them. The eco-innovative and sustainable public-private partnership is a multipartner public-private alliance that aims to develop practice that shows industry how and in what direction to innovate. The knowledge-intensive development of a new sustainable practice with a nationwide potential requires all participants to build a shared vision on sustainability. Participants also have to work on new cooperative ways to realize the new sustainable concept in practice. Sustainably innovative public-private partnerships are needed to transform the ideas that are generated by the key individuals at the co-ideation level into innovations for industry. Eco- and sustainably innovative public-private partnerships are the fourth element at the co-innovation level of the model of eco-innovation and sustainability management (see Figure 8.1 ).
