Abstract
Sustainable business model innovation cannot reach its full sustainability potential if it neglects the importance of multi-stakeholder alignment. Several studies emphasize the need for multi-stakeholder collaboration to enable sustainable business model innovation, but few studies offer guidance to companies for engaging in such a collaborative process. Based on the concept of boundary work, this study presents a tested process tool that helps companies engage with multiple stakeholders to innovate sustainable business models. The tool was developed in three iterative phases, including testing and evaluation with 74 participants in six sustainable business model innovation cases. The final process tool consists of five steps to facilitate multi-stakeholder alignment for sustainable business model innovation: (1) defining a collective ambition, (2) mapping and negotiating the changing organizational boundaries, (3) exploring opportunities and tensions for aligning stakeholders, (4) defining first interventions and (5) developing a collaboration pitch. We found that the tool enables discussions and negotiations on sensitive topics, such as power reconfigurations and mutual responsibilities to help stakeholders align. For companies, the boundary tool enriches sustainable business model innovation by offering guidance in the process of redesigning their multi-stakeholder system, assessing their own organizational boundaries, exploring, negotiating and prioritizing strategic actions based on organizational boundary changes and kick-starting new partnerships.
Highlights
Over the past few years, sustainable business model innovation (SBMI) has gained attention as a necessary means to contribute to sustainable development and the circular economy [1,2,3,4]
The boundary tool enriches sustainable business model innovation by offering guidance in the process of redesigning their multi-stakeholder system, assessing their own organizational boundaries, exploring, negotiating and prioritizing strategic actions based on organizational boundary changes and kick-starting new partnerships
The boundary tool presented in this paper addresses the changing and interdependent stakeholder boundaries involved in collaborative SBMI
Summary
Over the past few years, sustainable business model innovation (SBMI) has gained attention as a necessary means to contribute to sustainable development and the circular economy [1,2,3,4] To reach this sustainability potential, multiple studies have found that this requires a collaborative process which innovates the business model of the initiating company [5,6,7] and aligns the business models of multiple stakeholders [8,9,10]. Many companies tend to set the scope of their SBMI process rather narrowly to avoid having to deal with multiple stakeholders in lengthy and complicated processes [12] Instead, they often opt for bilateral collaborations with producers and customers, which leads to incremental innovations rather than exploring more far-reaching innovations necessary for sustainable business models [12,13,14]. While important work is being done to assist individual organizations involved in processes of SBMI [17,18,19], a multi-stakeholder approach that supports the development of collaborative stakeholder environments for this purpose is missing [2, 20,21,22]
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