Innovation policies have a tradition of targeting entrepreneurship, but more recently, some investigated their ability to foster responsible innovation. These approaches are emerging, and are likely to spread. However, as the literature emphasizes startups’ sustainability impact assessment issues, challenges might arise. I conducted a longitudinal exploratory study on the field, using the original case of i-Lab, a public grant for startups which added environmental and societal criteria in its evaluation. It provided an in-depth understanding of implementation and sustainability impact assessment challenges created by an innovation policy targeting responsible innovation for technological startups. I demonstrated the importance of the anticipation phase, which can be better prepared to extend acceptability and to guide entrepreneurs, thus overcoming their lack of knowledge on sustainability.
This research aims to extend our knowledge of reshoring motives by highlighting motives to manufacture locally against all odds that were previously not identified because research has essentially focused on large multinational companies or well-known luxury brands. The offshoring/reshoring literature clarifies the motivations and the barriers behind a firm’s to reshore. Bringing production activities back in Western counties has been identified as a shift in the firm competitive strategy. The empirical research will study a French brand in the apparel industry, 1083 that reshored the entire production process in France regions, historically linked to the textile industry. The textile sector characterized by a long, complex, and fragmented global value chain (Gereffi and al., 2010) makes the analysis of the born local strategy in the sector more relevant. The findings describe how the disadvantage of being born local (high costs, resources constraints and no flexibility)can however be counterbalanced by an active multi-stakeholder’s governance and engaging the audience by creating value communication.
