Challenges involving economic, environmental, and societal aspects necessitate organisations in business networks to collaborate. The scientific problem central to this paper is the difficulty of building sustainable collaborations. The research question is how to support organisations in building sustainable collaborations in their business relationships. This paper presents a new socio-technical approach to this end, i.e., PDPS (an acronym for Participatory Design of Participatory Systems) and explores its potential in a case study. PDPS is a value-based approach to the participatory design of participatory systems. Such socio-technical systems enable people working in different disciplines, departments, and organisational levels to create sustainable relationships supported by distributed information and communication technology. In a participatory system, participants gain trust, engagement, and empowerment to self-organise actions that produce results they could not have achieved alone. Following PDPS, participants collectively explore challenges in their relationship, define a joint value-based mission, and create a continuous process of self-organisation to fulfil this mission. In a case study, PDPS supported two Dutch business partners in solving recurring transport and logistics issues in retail store refurbishment projects. Turning their traditional business processes into participatory ones led to new solutions for sustainable transport and logistics, more joint business, and more profit. PDPS differs from other approaches in its involvement of all participants in a business relationship, its focus on shared values, and its capacity for creating a continuous process of self-organisation to fulfil a joint mission. This paper may support researchers, practitioners, and organisational policymakers interested in building sustainable collaborations in business networks.@en

The purpose of this paper is the introduction of a participatory systems design method to find solutions for multi-stakeholder challenges. This method, called Participatory Systems Design (PSD), aims to improve collaboration by increasing trust, engagement, and empowerment of people from different organizations and organizational levels, operating in a socio-technical setting. Participants collectively explore the challenges in their relation, define the values related to these challenges and create a continuous process of self- organization to fulfil their mission. In this way, participants increase their ability to communicate, collaborate and improve their performance. The PSD method is problem-oriented and consists of three steps to improve business relations in a business network. Following PSD, stakeholders work together on solving complex issues in business processes, resulting in more trust, engagement, and empowerment and an increased ability to collaborate at all organizational levels. The dynamic alignment of business processes leads to a better business relation, more joint business, cost savings, and sustainable solutions. The preservation business networks share a multi-stakeholder context that correlates with the specifics of a participatory design approach and could benefit from applying the PSD method. The introduction of this method allows to have a closer look at the opportunities and limitations for the application of PSD in preservation networks. This will need further research and this paper is an attempt to initiate an uptake using a well-researched case study in another domain as an important reference.@en