Conference Programme

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our time, requiring collaborative action across public and private actors. However, we know little about how (public-private) collaborations can potentially act as stewards of systemic change. We adopt a system perspective to examine how collaborations translate into environmental potential and conduct fixed-effects regression with 1,992 European climate-tech companies (2000-2023), along with several robustness checks to mitigate concerns about endogeneity. We link company and collaboration data with a forward-looking Emission Reduction Potential (ERP) metric, capturing the yearly potential reduction (percentage) in emissions to incumbent baselines. Three main findings emerge: First, system embeddedness through collaboration stock is positively associated with ERP, with effects being stronger in the company's early life. Second, public-private collaboration shows directionally higher ERP, with the strongest associations found in government laboratories and agencies. Third, collaboration stock today predicts additional collaboration partners tomorrow, consistent with reinforcing system dynamics. We contribute to the literature on collaboration and public-private collaborations in the context of grand challenges by reframing collaboration as a dynamic systems strategy and by linking ties to a forward-looking environmental potential. The evidence further informs practitioners seeking to design a collaboration system to accelerate decarbonization and combat climate change.