Building a collaboration capability for sustainability: How Gap Inc. is creating and leveraging a strategic asset

Organizations are being challenged to find socially acceptable and ecologically proactive solutions while fulfilling economic expectations. One emerging pattern in response to this challenge is the development of sustainability goals and strategies, which include the development of internal processes and systems to lower carbon footprints, address other green issues, and create more worker-friendly environments. Another emerging pattern is the capability to collaborate across the wide range of external stakeholders. External collaboration also requires the development of internal processes, systems, knowledge, and structures to support ongoing learning to deal with the increasing complexity found in the multi-stakeholder domain. This article describes one organization's development of the latter capability. The business challenges Gap Inc. faced and the approach it used to evolve a multi-stakeholder collaboration capability could apply to many companies with complex supply chains with large ecological, social, and financial ramifications. The capabilities that they have developed and the way they developed them will be insightful for others. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]