Managing multi-stakeholder co-creation to address Grand Challenges: the role of paradox management capabilities

Addressing Grand Challenges such as disruptive sustainability requires transformative innovations and policy frameworks that enable coordinated, systemic, multi-stakeholder co-creation. Yet, we have limited understanding of the capabilities needed to manage the paradoxical tensions that arise in multi-stakeholder co-creation networks. We make an original contribution by using an evidence base composed of 30 co-creation initiatives from 21 countries and 3 transnational initiatives, developed to address challenges relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, a Grand Challenge characterised, exactly like disruptive sustainability, by large scale, complexity, and uncertainty. Our findings advance paradox theory by articulating six higher-order paradox-management capabilities needed to manage paradoxes relating to two levels of transformative innovation, project co-creation and programme co-creation. For each of these higher-order capabilities, we identify more specific routine capabilities that allow partners to manage these paradoxes to achieve swift and successful co-creation for disruptive sustainability. We provide implications for policy and practice.