Many companies nowadays commit to the idea of Shared Value for aligning their business interests with societal and environmental needs while creating long-term value for all stakeholders. Companies that adopt a Shared Value approach aim to increase their competitiveness, cut costs, and develop new revenue streams and business areas while contributing to a more sustainable future by reducing environmental impacts and increasing resource efficiency. This trend has also led to more sustainable operations and global supply chains. Yet, as the escalating tension between social progress, global prosperity, and the planetary emergency suggests, creating Shared Value for individual companies is not enough to enable companies and policymakers to mitigate, if not eliminate, the negative impacts of social and environmental risks in their supply chains.

The theme for the EurOMA Sustainability Forum in 2024 is “Rethinking Shared Value Creation through Sustainable Operations and Supply Chains.” After decades when purely economic objectives drove the management of operations and supply chains, businesses now recognize the importance of social and environmental goals, particularly the urgent need to achieve deep reductions in carbon emissions. The concept of Shared Value places an obligation on companies to manage their operations and supply chains in a way that is both environmentally and socially sustainable. At the 2024 Forum, we will look for research contributions that drill beneath the usual ‘shared value’ rhetoric to examine the real challenges businesses face in making their operations truly sustainable.

Can the concept of Shared Value be extended beyond the simplistic “win-win” idea to offer answers as to how values can be shared across entire supply chains? How do new paradigms for defining economic prosperity, such as the Circular Economy or the notion of Degrowth, challenge and transform global operations and supply chains? How can companies begin to take a more holistic view of the sustainability impacts of their operations and supply chains? We encourage research and discussion on innovative practices driving change toward a more sustainable future and showcase new and bold ways of thinking about creating Shared Value in global operations and supply chains. We also strive to discuss the measurement and communication of the Shared Value created by sustainable operations and supply chains at the EurOMA Sustainability Forum 2024.