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Private equity (PE) investors enhance the governance of portfolio companies by installing high-powered boards, structuring the senior management team, installing reward and performance management systems, and advising the portfolio company. The aim is to reduce agency risks and to increase shareholder value. A growing body of literature investigates the real effects of PE buyouts on their portfolio companies. Empirical evidence suggest that PE buyouts do not consider efficiency improvements as their main value-creating strategy, but PE enhances growth rather than efficiency. Researchers’ understanding of PE’s entrepreneurial growth approach to increase shareholder value is limited to date, although it is known that PE portfolio companies are active innovators and that PE portfolio companies extensively engage in acquisitive growth. Financial performance of PE investors can also be driven by transferring value from other stakeholders to the portfolio company after buyout. Does PE buyout’s shareholder value creation come at the expense of other stakeholders, such as employees or customers, or do they also benefit? PE’s impact on employment and wages in portfolio companies has received considerable attention. The effect depends on the institutional setting and macroeconomic conditions and differs across PE groups and by type of buyout. PE buyouts do improve employees’ safety, well-being, and human capital. Research on the impact of PE on stakeholders other than employees is limited. Industry-specific studies uncovered fine-grained actions and mainly negative effects on various stakeholders beyond shareholders and employees. This highlights the tension between enhancing shareholder value at the expense of stakeholder value. Given the continuous development of practices in the PE industry, the governance roles of PE will remain a fertile ground for academic research.

Sustainable development is about meeting the needs of current and future generations while operating in the safe ecological space of planetary boundaries. Against this background, companies can contribute to sustainability in both positive and negative ways. In a world of scarce resources, the positive contribution of businesses is to create value for diverse stakeholders (i.e., goods in the actual sense of good services and things with value) without social shortfalls or ecological overshooting with regard to planetary boundaries. Yet, when value-creation processes cause negative social or ecological externalities, companies create disvalue for current or future stakeholders, thus undermining sustainable development. Sustainability in business therefore aims at the integrative management of value creation and disvalue mitigation. Various institutions, such as sustainability laws as well as quasi-regulatory and voluntary sustainability standards, aim at providing an enabling environment in this regard yet are often insufficient. Corporate sustainability therefore calls for proactive management. Neither value nor disvalue fall from heaven but are rather co-created or caused through the interaction with stakeholders. Transforming from unsustainability to sustainability thus requires transforming the underlying relational arrangements. Here, market and non-market stakeholder relations need to be distinguished. In markets, companies transact with customers, employees, suppliers, and financiers who typically have voluntary exchange relationships with the firm. As a result, stakeholders can use the exit option when the relationship causes them harm. Companies therefore need to know and respect their value-creation partners, their potential contributions, and above all their needs. Sustainability can influence these market relationships in two ways. First, as sustainability addresses environmental, social, and ethical issues that are otherwise often overlooked, sustainability can relate to specific goals and motivations that stakeholders pursue when they care about these matters. Second, sustainability can be linked to transaction-specific particularities. This can be the case when sustainability features lead to information asymmetries, higher transaction costs, or resource dependencies. Non-market relationships, however, can differ in that stakeholders are involuntarily affected by the firm. In many cases, such as environmental pollution, stakeholders like local communities experience disvalue but cannot simply walk away. From a sustainability perspective, giving voice to non-market stakeholders through dialogue and participation is therefore crucial to identify early-on potential issues where companies cause disvalue. Such a proactive dialogue does not necessarily present a constraint that limits value creation in the market. Giving a voice to non-market stakeholders can also help create innovations and mobilize valuable resources such as knowledge, legitimacy, and partnership. The key idea is to find solutions that create value not only for market stakeholders but also for a larger circle, including non-market stakeholders as well. Such stakeholder business cases for sustainability aim at the synergistic integration of value creation and disvalue mitigation.

Multi-sided digital platform (MSDP) business models have enabled the reorganization of industries and are fundamentally changing the way firms innovate and grow. Fueled by advances in digital technology, digital platform firms such as Apple, Alibaba, Amazon, Google, Tencent, and ByteDance have gained prominence around the globe. MSDPs create value by facilitating interconnections of products, services, or systems generated by a variety of external actors, thereby enabling them to interact in ways that otherwise might be elusive. Theoretical and empirical work on digital platforms also has accelerated in recent decades. Scholars have explored a variety of topics such as platform competition, network effects and their implications, platforms and corporate scope (i.e., vertical integration into complementary offerings), platform types, complementor heterogeneity, and platform governance and ecosystem orchestration. Much of the empirical literature directs attention to the economics of platforms at the exclusion of analyzing how differences in strategic objectives and choices contribute to unique MSDP positions within an ecosystem. Heterogeneity in strategic objectives contributes to variation in platform scope, governance practices, and potential externalities and thus influences the strategic and organizational benefits accruing to participating actors and the platform itself. It follows that analyzing platforms from a strategic view can help to identify innovations in MSDPs and their governance. In one novel MSDP model, the co-innovation platform, the primary strategic objective is accelerating innovation and ecosystem growth by enabling collaboration among a wide array of diverse external actors. Aligned with a focus on the quality of collaborations, one of a co-innovation MSDP’s distinguishing value creation features is its hands-on approach to the formation and execution of co-innovation partnerships. This hands-on approach relies on different governance choices and yields a different mix of strategic and organizational benefits for partners and the platform relative to the hands-off approach employed by most MSDPs. Many opportunities exist for advancing theory and empirical work on the implications of platform heterogeneity.