Agility learning opportunities in cross-sector collaboration. An exploratory study

This chapter is designed to fill this gap through a preliminary empirical analysis of a case study, which represents a best practice in cross-sector partnerships in humanitarian logistics, and aims to investigate the following research questions: RQ1: Can companies concretely learn agility from the humanitarian sector in emergency relief operations? RQ2: What do they concretely learn in terms of agility? To address these points, we organize the remainder of this chapter as follows. The next section outlines the theoretical background of this study in a synthetic manner. We present the main insights from the literature on the chances that businesses can learn supply-chain agility from the field of humanitarian emergency management (section “Agility in Humanitarian Supply Chains”), the importance of the mutual benefits of a collaboration (section “Mutual Benefits That Are Derived from Collaboration”), the cross-sector learning opportunities (section “Cross-Sector Learning Opportunities”), and partnership models for cross-sector collaboration in humanitarian logistics (section “Partnership Models for Cross-Sector Collaboration in Humanitarian Logistics”). We then focus more on the empirical investigation that adds the most value. The case study is presented in section “Case Study Analysis”. We choose a best practice case study (section “Methodology”) and describe it in section “The LET Initiative”. The results obtained from the case study analysis and discussion are provided in sections “Key Findings” and “Discussion”.