About the ENGAGE.EU Think Tank

ENGAGE.EU is an alliance of leading European universities in business, economics and social sciences, aiming to provide European citizens with the set of skills and competencies they need to face the current and future societal challenges.

The ENGAGE.EU Think Tanks provides a forum for intensive academic exchange. Researchers will exchange their ideas with colleagues from ENGAGE.EU partners and inform and learn from leading academic, industry and policy experts. Participants can build new research collaborations and launch new projects, papers, or funding applications.

The Think Tank 2026 will bring together researchers from the ENGAGE.EU partner universities who share an interest in research on inter-organizational collaboration and networks from a broad range of disciplines such as political science, public management, sociology, economics, social psychology, business and management, organization studies, accounting, law and finance.

The Think Tank is focused on the question, how we can tackle complex social and environmental problems in an interconnected world and achieve transformational change through inter-organizational collaborations and networks that address joint problems that none of the organizations could achieve individually. Whether it is about eradicating sickness through a sustained mass vaccination strategy (the GAVI vaccine alliance), making supply chains free of slave labor and improve workers’ working conditions, or making agricultural production more regenerative, tackling these social and environmental sustainability issues requires collaboration between a multitude of organizations often from different sectors. As a consequence, the use of inter-organizational collaborations to tackle Wicked Problems or Grand Challenges has greatly increased in the last three decades as also illustrated by the SDG 17 “partnership for the goals”. Yet, such collaborations often add another layer of complexity and the majority of them fail which raises the essential question how sustainable and effective collaboration can be achieved.

The literature on sustainability in combination with organizational networks, collaborations, purpose-oriented networks, meta-organizations, value chains, cross-sector or multi-stakeholder partnerships as organizational forms has greatly increased in the last three decades. Yet, the literature is very diverse and distributed over many disciplines and the mutual recognition and interlinkages can certainly be improved. In the Think Tank we will focus on inter-organizational collaborations as groups of three or more organizations and discuss a broad range of issues from empirical -analytical and prescriptive perspectives from the global to the local level.

The Think Tank is aimed at exploring research opportunities related to the following core themes and questions:

1. Conditions and consequences

• Why do such collaborations exist and how do they come into being?
• How do different foundational conditions affect collaboration performance?
• Under which conditions should they be used and under which rather not?
• Why and under what circumstances do organizations join and exit them?

2. Governance and roles

• How are/should they be governed and managed?
• What are the consequences for the participating organizations for example in terms of accounting, staffing and internal management?
• How can organizations be “good partners” in such collaborations?
• What are the contradictions and synergies between partner and network results?

3. Legal contexts and forms

• How are/can they be designed contingent on their administrative and legal context.
• How do they manifest themselves in different legal and contractual forms?
• What are/can be the consequences of different legal forms and designs?

4. Sustaining the collaboration

• What makes organizational collaborations sustainable? What is the definition of collaboration sustainability?
• How are/can they be financed and resourced?
• How can collaboration be economically sustained throughout the different stages of the lifecycle?

5. Accountability: external and internal

• How are/should they be evaluated?
• What levels (individual, organizational, network, societal) are relevant for evaluation purposes?
• How is accountability and supervision in and of organizational collaborations organized?

6. Stakeholder participation

• How do/can citizens and ultimate beneficiaries have a voice in these collaborations?
• How is participation in and access to organizational collaborations organized?

Next to the theoretical and conceptual questions, we are especially interested in empirical questions of organizational collaborations in the context of: SDG 3 Good Health and Well Being – partnering for the digital transformation, SDG 11 Sustainable cities and communities, SDG 12 Responsible consumption and production  – transitioning to the Circular Economy and SDG 13 Climate action – Climate and the Energy Transition, and SDG 15 on protecting, restoring and promoting Biodiversity and Ecosystems. In addition to conceptual and theoretical discussions, we will also engage with societal partners within ENGAGE.EU in these areas.