The role of e-supply chain collaboration in collaborative innovation and value-co creation

Business organisations and their supply chains face increasing challenges due to the spread of epidemics such as Covid-19 and wars like the Russian war on Ukraine. These challenges have restricted the stream of supply chain processes and activities from the sourcing point to the consumption point, adding many new uncertainties to the environment facing companies, prompting them to rethink their supply chain strategies (Sarkis, 2020). These crises have prompted novel changes in market conditions and consumer demand and needs, disrupting the functions and stability of supply chains. The result has been that supply chain collaboration and agility became a basic necessity for the survival of all their members.

Collaboration is a basic area in the study of supply chain management. Supply chain collaboration enables participants to respond quakily to dynamic changes in the business environment through planning and implementing collaborative activities (Shafique et al., 2019). It is an integrative mechanism, in which Information Technology (IT) plays an essential role, for companies to share and coordinate internal and external resources, operational competencies and other capabilities in order to attain goals that are impossible to achieve individually. The advancement in IT and the evolution of e-business applications have substantially transformed supply chain collaboration, agility, collaborative value creation, and the overall performance of firms and supply chains (Wang et al., 2017, Alzoubi and Yanamandra, 2020, Baah et al., 2021). Therefore, electronic (e)-supply chain collaboration can be described as the organisation’s capability of utilising and employing e-business applications to support information and knowledge exchange, coordinate activities, and conduct online collaboration and processes with its chain members.

Agility and innovation are critical dynamic capabilities in responding to unexpected events and coping with unforeseen challenges (Yoon et al., 2014, Chen, 2019, Messabia et al., 2022). Such crises, which can change human lives and the fates of organisations, have triggered the need to re-examine many business solutions and strategies, including supply chain agility and collaborative innovation, to promote rapid responses and adaptations.

Supply chain agility is among the solutions suggested as a lifeline enabling firms to monitor highly uncertain environments and unprecedented disruptions and respond to them proactively (Naughton et al., 2020). This solution is widely viewed as one of the most important strategies in responding to uncertainties and market turbulence (Gligor & Holcomb, 2012). Understanding their determinants and expected outcomes is fundamental for employing supply chain agility.

In such unprecedented global crises, the ability of organisations to react and innovate has become an indispensable requirement for survival. Volatile consumer requirements and accelerated product obsolescence under unpredictable environmental uncertainty have driven businesses to enhance their ability to generate innovation through inter-organisational collaboration (Zhang and Yang, 2016, Yaseen et al., 2018, Alzoubi and Yanamandra, 2020). Periods of disasters and crises provide firms with opportunities to create novel combinations of innovations and use new supply sources (Gur et al., 2020). According to Pinto (2020), companies collaborate and coordinate the collective capabilities of their supply chain members to create innovative solutions in responding to an unstable environment and inconstant market demand. Collaborative innovation creates value and benefits for all participants in value co-creation.

The traditional strategy of creating isolated value creation has lost its utility with the increasing necessity for collaboration among supply chain members. Value co-creation became a central topic in supply chain research, presenting a new prospect for understanding value creation in supply chains. Recent studies (e.g., Ju et al., 2020, Zhang and Meng, 2021) confirm that the existing literature on value co-creation focuses more on production and consumption than supply chain performance, which is rarely considered from this perspective. While the literature has investigated many drivers and consequences of supply chain agility, the potential driving role played by collaborative innovation, and value co-creation as an outcome, have largely been ignored.

The impacts of evolving ICT on supply chain collaboration capabilities have been analysed for decades. Despite these efforts, further investigations are still needed into the relationships between e-supply chain collaboration, agility, innovation, and their impact on value creation. The literature review discloses an absence of empirical examination of the relationships between e-supply chain collaboration, collaborative innovation, agility, and value co-creation as a unified research model. Therefore, research is needed on the role of e-supply chain collaboration in collaborative innovation, supply chain agility, and value co-creation. Hence, this study examines the following two research questions to address literature gaps. RQ1: does e-supply chain collaboration impact collaborative innovation, supply chain agility, and value co-creation? RQ2: does collaborative innovation and supply chain agility impact value co-creation?

To address these questions, this study employs the resource-based view (RBV) and dynamic capabilities as the theoretical lens through which to understand how firms may co-create value by employing e-business applications to coordinate activities and conduct online collaboration and processes among supply chain members. In this regard, dynamic capabilities describe firms’ abilities to respond and interact with business environment changes through acquiring, integrating, and reconfiguring resources and competencies (Jiao et al., 2019). Therefore, the present study examines the impact of e-supply chain collaboration on collaborative innovation, supply chain agility, and value co-creation. It also examines the impact on value co-creation of collaborative innovation and supply chain agility. The main finding of this study is that e-supply chain collaboration has a significant impact on collaborative innovation, supply chain agility, and value co-creation. Secondly, a significant impact of collaborative innovation on supply chain agility and value co-creation is revealed.

The rest of the paper is organised as follows. The next section reviews related literature. The research model and the hypotheses are presented in Section 3. Section 4 outlines the development of the instruments used, the data collection and the results, which are discussed in Section 5. Finally, we conclude and highlight the study’s limitations and future work in the last section.