To address climate change, health, and food-related challenges at the international and regional level, policy makers and researchers are starting to acknowledge the importance of building and developing sustainable food systems (SFSs). This study aims to discuss the drivers of, barriers to, and policy recommendations for developing sustainable food systems in four European countries (Germany, Italy, Norway, and Romania). We used critical frame analysis to investigate national policy documents on sustainable food systems and conducted in-depth interviews with various national stakeholders representing policy makers, agrifood businesses, and civil society. The novelty of this research lies in comparing national policy approaches and stakeholders’ opinions on SFS development in a multi-country analysis. These European countries have different conditions in terms of geography, socioeconomic situation, environmental performance, and sustainability orientation. Several cross-cultural differences and gaps in the existing national policies for sustainable food systems were identified, and solutions that help overcome these issues have been suggested. The first step in developing SFS should focus on interdisciplinary and trans-sectorial policy integration combined with increasing stakeholder collaboration across all sectors of the economy. We also recommend more active involvement of consumers in the food system, developing information-sharing networks, and increasing collaborations within the food supply chains.

The role of firms in the process of regional renewal and path development is a somewhat neglected area in the existing literature. With few exceptions, the literature is mainly concerned with aggregated development paths. To cover this gap, the current study turns its attention to cross-industry innovation capability (CIIC) building in firms and discusses how conditions for innovation and learning in a region drive this process. We introduce a new concept of CIIC – that is, the firm’s ability to transform knowledge and ideas from different industries into new products, processes and systems and/or its ability to adapt existing products, processes and systems to new industries – and identify its drivers and indicators. The discussion is supported by empirical studies of firms in three Norwegian case regions that undergo the restructuring process due to the recent severe decrease in oil prices. Our empirical data demonstrate that organizationally thick and diversified regions are more favourable for firms’ abilities to develop CIIC and cross-industry innovation activity. As a result, we emphasize that future regional policies should have a stronger focus on the linkages between internal firm characteristics and regional innovation systems to contribute to the firms’ absorptive capacity for developing cross-industry innovation.

The chapter focuses on using crowdfunding for financing sustainable projects, that is projects aiming to extend their goal beyond market success and provide benefit to the larger part of society. The chapter discusses the definition and dimensions of sustainable development and sustainable entrepreneurship and provides an overview of the existing literature on crowdfunding of sustainable projects. The authors also review four European sustainability-oriented crowdfunding platforms representing different crowdfunding models. This review reveals that sustainable projects have rather high success rates in crowdfunding and may address all the three dimensions of sustainable development. However, environmental dimension gets the most attention. All the crowdfunding models are relevant for sustainable projects; yet, Loan-based crowdfunding seems to have the highest success rates. Moreover, focus on a particular dimension of sustainability may influence the choice of the crowdfunding model.