Strategic shifts toward sustainability: the pivotal role of ecological knowledge

Increasingly, firms actively seek to understand their interdependence with nature, build innovative capabilities, and generate more radical shifts toward operating sustainably. This creates exciting opportunities to investigate exactly how companies like General Mills, IKEA or Barilla obtain such "ecological knowledge" and how they use it both to cope with climate change or declining ecosystem resilience, and to maintain or even strengthen ecosystems. We link theories of knowledge and dynamic capabilities from the management literature with research from modern ecology to investigate the processes through which organizations can effectively acquire, absorb and integrate ecological knowledge with current organizational knowledge and strategies. Drawing on descriptive cases, we propose a conceptual framework of how companies deliberately create processes to access, co-create and integrate ecological knowledge, thus building capabilities and broader strategies for sustainability. Our paper (1) contributes fresh impulses for research that identifies content and processes of dynamic capabilities, thus laying the foundation for more robust theory, (2) accesses concepts and perspectives from outside management theory's disciplinary boundaries to build new theory for sustainable business strategy, and (3) offers novel directions for research on the role of ecological knowledge in corporate sustainability management.