Orchestrating Sustainable Stakeholder Value Creation: A Product Life Cycle Extension Perspective

The primary role of managers at the helm of companies is to create superior “shared value” to customers, shareholders and other key stakeholders. Orchestrating a business model that identifies “sweet spots” creating value to all stakeholders is the essence of sustainable competitive advantage. Product life cycle extension and the circular economy is one such “sweet spot” that creates competitive advantage. This chapter builds a conceptual model bringing together value creation framework grounded in the resource based theory, sustainability theories including triple bottom line and corporate social responsibility frameworks and the product life cycle extension, circular economy, and reverse supply chain principles to postulate that product life cycle extensions are an important paradigm to achieve shared and sustainable competitive advantage for firms. The chapter ends with a set of challenges in implementing circular economy and raises relevant research questions that could deepen scholarly research in this critical area of shared value and product life cycle extension strategies.