Sharing and Managing Sustainability Information and Data in Collaborative Ecosystems—Insights From Testing a Novel Assessment Method With the Automotive Industry

Journal article, 2026

The manufacturing industry is under pressure from upcoming legislation and societal expectations to design sustainable solutions, requiring improved intraorganizational and interorganizational collaboration to ensure sustainability is integrated throughout the product's lifecycle. However, one limitation is the current inability to share and manage sustainability information and data effectively among value chain actors. To address this, we make three key contributions in this study: (i) 14 key sustainability-contextualized assessment criteria to guide the assessment of a collaborative ecosystem's current ability to share and manage sustainability information and data; (ii) an interactive and cross-functional method that integrates these 14 assessment criteria promoting ownership, awareness, and a shared understanding of key issues and ways forward; (iii) situation-specific knowledge on how to assess the ability to share and manage sustainability information and data in collaborative ecosystems, by applying the assessment method across six industrial case studies with the automotive industry.