Institutional legitimacy of non-profit innovation facilitators: Strategic postures in regulated environments

Sustainable production and consumption is a hot topic in innovation policies. Most European producers of electrical and electronic equipment have joined collective compliance schemes - generally called Producer Responsibility Organizations (PROs) - to guarantee compliance with the mandatory requirements that enforce the Extended Producer Responsibility principle. The role of PROs is to: (1) reduce the environmental impact of the end-of-life of products, and (2) stimulate innovation pathways in the activities conducted in the supply chain (collecting, sorting, dismantling and recycling). The paper makes use of data collected with a questionnaire investigated with a Latent Cluster Analysis (LCA) and the data emerging from the grey literature to present an analysis of European PROs operating in the e-waste sector. Results highlight that regulation introducing policy targets in terms of supply chain performance without organizational prescriptions lead to three different strategic postures. Relational rents and institutional rents emerge as the main determinants of those forms. The lack of correlation between the level of strategy proactivity and environmental performances underlines the immaturity of the implementation of the EPR principle that failed to stimulate innovation in the supply chain.