As the unfolding climate crisis escalates, incumbent manufacturing companies are increasingly sensing and seizing sustainability opportunities—ideas that help to generate value in a more sustainable way than existing alternatives. Prior literature has underscored the importance of opportunity recognition and has theorized various types of circular business models to address sustainability in practice. However, there is a knowledge gap regarding the step in between: undertaking an assessment that provides a foundation for subsequently pursuing a circular business model. Based on a multiple case study of four innovation projects pursuing sustainability, this article identifies capability assessment, ecosystem alignment, and value-capture viability as key dimensions in evaluating sustainability opportunities prior to circular business model design and development. These insights are aggregated into a framework that allows companies to conduct a systematic assessment of sustainability opportunities in practice. The framework provides new theoretical implications for the literature on circular economy and business model innovation, and it offers hands-on advice for management practice. 

To address climate change, firms are increasingly forming sustainability alliances. Pursuing sustainability via such alliances is challenging as it means working with multifaceted and not necessarily compatible goals. Moreover, it often requires collaboration among heterogeneous partners outside traditional industrial contexts as well as dealing with wicked problems. This article presents a multiple-case study of eight sustainability alliances in Sweden, identifying managerial challenges and solutions over three phases where such alliances unfold. It offers a framework, tailored to each phase, to help companies fulfill their goals by proactively addressing the challenges posed by the pursuit of sustainability through alliances.

Governments increasingly launch transformative policy missions to address complex societal challenges such as climate change. While the literature on mission-oriented innovation policy highlights the role of stakeholder contestation and emphasizes the need to promote alignment, it often overlooks the nature of underlying disagreements. This paper distinguishes between factual and normative disagreement across problems, solutions, and interventions, and applies Q methodology to identify and analyze four distinct stakeholder narratives in the mission to decarbonize Swedish industry. The narratives reveal different varieties of disagreement, ranging from factual concerns about technological feasibility and policy effectiveness to normative critiques of directionality and legitimacy. Our findings demonstrate that missions involve not only alignment, but also disjointment – persistent divergences of opinion rooted in fundamentally conflicting values and beliefs. Recognizing disjointment underscores the need for mission-oriented policymaking to balance efforts to foster alignment with strategies that address enduring conflict through mediation, recognition, redistribution, and compensation.