Public-Private Partnerships and Sustainable Development – Designing Relational Business Models

There are tremendous challenges in meeting the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) of Agenda 2030. A collaborative search for solutions is needed to tackle the complex and novel problems at the crux of these challenges. This requires local governments and companies to join forces with other stakeholders. This collaboration usually takes the form of new Public-Private partnerships (PPPs) in emerging innovation ecosystems focused on the SDGs. These ecosystems are integrated through relational business models – multisided platforms with heterogeneous stakeholders and multidimensional utilities. Using the newly developed stakeholder resource-based view (SRBV), we have identified some characteristics of these business models and their complex relational governance. We recognize that a lot of work is still needed to define the right governance for PPPs.