Faik Hamza Faruqui

PhD Research Profile

I am a PhD fellow at the Department of Aalborg University Business School, Denmark. My research is situated within the field of international business and innovation, focusing on sustainability transitions in global industries.

My PhD project, titled “Organizational Capabilities and Green Technology Innovation in Circular Ecosystems: A Study of Bangladesh’s Apparel Industry”, investigates how organizational capabilities and inter-firm complementarity shape firm-specific innovation strategies for acquiring and implementing green technologies within circular economy transitions.

The research is motivated by the sustainability challenges of the global apparel industry and the increasing pressure on firms to transition from linear production systems to circular models. While multinational buyers often drive sustainability agendas, supplier firms, particularly in institutionally weaker contexts such as Bangladesh, face constraints in adopting green technologies and circular practices.

The project focuses on how firm-level organizational capabilities, specifically coordinating, learning, and reconfiguring capabilities, interact with institutional contexts and ecosystem structures to determine innovation strategies. These capabilities are understood as institutionally embedded and path-dependent, shaping how firms respond to sustainability demands and technological change.

A central argument of the research is that circular economy transitions cannot be understood solely through dyadic buyer–supplier relationships. Instead, they must be analyzed at the ecosystem level, where multiple interdependent actors, particularly multinational firms, local institutions, and complementors, jointly influence innovation outcomes. The degree of complementarity between buyer and supplier capabilities plays a critical role in enabling or constraining green technology adoption across these ecosystems.

The study further examines how institutional differences between global buyers and local suppliers affect capability development, collaboration patterns, and innovation pathways. In particular, it investigates how national and transnational institutions shape firms’ ability to coordinate knowledge, access resources, and reconfigure capabilities necessary for circular transitions.

To address these issues, the PhD project is structured around three interrelated research questions:

1. How are organizational capabilities for creating or acquiring green technology innovations developed across ecosystems?
2. How do ecosystem actors on the buyer side interact with geographically distant suppliers under differing institutional conditions?
3. How does complementarity between buyer and supplier firms influence green technology adoption and circular transition outcomes?

Methodologically, the research adopts a critical realist perspective combined with a social constructivist epistemology, using qualitative case studies based on semi-structured interviews with managers and key actors in Bangladeshi apparel firms, complemented by document analysis and field observations.

Overall, the project contributes to international business, ecosystem theory, and organizational capabilities literature by linking firm-level capability development with ecosystem-level complementarity and institutional dynamics in the context of circular economy transitions.