Sustainable Business Model Innovation Research Articles

The blockchain as a sustainable business model innovation

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to strive to close the current research gap pertaining to potential implications of the blockchain (BC) for sustainable business models (SBMs) in the agri-food industry.Design/methodology/approachTo answer the research question, the authors utilised the Value Triangle framework by Biloslavo et al. (2018) in order to explore the potential innovation of BC for SBMs in the agri-food industry. Then, the authors apply it to an in-depth exploratory case study of the Placido Volpone winery. The authors draw data from strategic plans, annual reports, corporate website and a semi-structured interview with the winery's founder.FindingsThe authors show how BC technology could be a source of SBM innovation in the agri-food industry.Research limitations/implicationsBC technology has the potential to significantly change SBMs. Given the huge set-up investments by the industry, academic research investigating potential implications and supporting companies in their application of BC is needed. This paper explores how the implications of BC as source of innovation on SBMs can be investigated.Practical implicationsThe research results of this study can be used by company leaders and managers to support the development of SBMs through the introduction of BC technology in their business activities.Originality/valueThe paper is novel because it investigates the relationship between SBM innovation and BC providing theoretical justification to SBM technological innovation in an agri-food setting. Additionally, the paper provides an empirical application of the framework by Biloslavo et al. (2018) for understanding the development of SBM through BC in the agri-food industry.

Anatomy of sustainable business model innovation

The growing literature on Sustainable Business Model Innovation has received much attention, not of academicians only but practitioners also. The concept and the theoretical rationalisation of its components still need more elaboration. So far, more should be known about its philosophy of existence, which obstructs its development towards its literature. This study attempts to bridge this gap by revealing the derived philosophy of Sustainable Business Model Innovation. It assesses the inclusion of Business Model components in Sustainable Business Model Innovation by identifying related 61 research papers and qualitatively anatomise them. The study attempts to connect the analogy of Sustainable Business Model Innovation with Business Model Innovation and Sustainable Business Model. The results identified analogies between Business Model, Business Model Innovation, Sustainable Business Model, and Sustainable Business Model Innovation, and configures Sustainable Business Model Innovation based on sustainable value innovation. The research gap and questions have been identified. Based on the analysis, the research has proposed Sustainable Business Model Innovation components comprised of Sustainable Value Proposition Innovation, Sustainable Value Creation and Delivery Innovation, and Sustainable Value Capture Innovation. This study contributes to the Sustainable Business Model Innovation theoretical literature and would help the practitioner and researcher to develop concise and comprehensive sub-components and metrics for Sustainable Business Model Innovation.

Fad or Trend? Rethinking the Sustainability of Connected Health

Policymakers, academics, and industry players have been focused on determining whether connected health (CH) is a fad or a trend by looking at its sustainability. Although the significance of innovation in healthcare is gradually rising, a definitive identification and systematic comprehension of the core drivers, structure, content, and pattern of innovation in CH are missing. To bridge this gap, this study re-examines and analyses CH from the perspectives of its industrial chain and structure, to assess its future prospects and sustainability by focusing on how its structures and participants act in the ecosystem. This study involves an inductive theory building approach based on multi-stage, semi-structured interviews (n = 60 in total). The results indicate that the core drivers, constituents, and components of CH need to be identified and restructured. A valid discourse, which is missing in the current literature, should be proposed with regard to the sustainability of CH. A sustainable business model innovation (BMI) system and the methods employed to achieve sustainability are suggested to discover indicators for future success. This study enriches the current CH understanding from a technology perspective and suggests some implications for practitioners as well as policymakers to enhance sustainable development in the healthcare sector.

Addressing the design-implementation gap of sustainable business models by prototyping: A tool for planning and executing small-scale pilots

Next to the redesign of industrial products and processes, sustainable business model innovation is a strategic approach to integrate environmental and social concerns into the objectives and operations of organizations. One of the major challenges of this approach is that many promising business model ideas fail to reach the market, which is needed to achieve impact. In the literature, the issue is referred to as a “design-implementation gap.” This paper explores how that critical gap may be bridged. In doing so, we contribute to sustainable business model innovation theory and practice. We contribute to theory by connecting sustainable business model innovation with business experimentation and strategic design, two innovation approaches that leverage prototyping as a way to iteratively implement business ideas early on. Using a design science research methodology, we combine theoretical insights from these three literatures into a tool for setting up small-scale pilots of sustainable business models. We apply, evaluate, and improve our tool through a rigorous process by working with nine startups and one multinational company. As a result, we provide normative theory in terms of the sustainable business model innovation process, explaining that piloting a prototype forces organizations to simultaneously consider the desirability (i.e., what users want), feasibility (i.e., what is technically achievable), viability (i.e., what is financially possible), and sustainability (i.e., what is economically, socially and environmentally acceptable) of a new business model. Doing so early on is functional to bridge the design-implementation gap of sustainable business models. We contribute to practice with the tool itself, which organizations can use to translate sustainable business model ideas defined “on paper” into small-scale pilots as a first implementation step. We encourage future research building on the limitations of this exploratory study by working with a larger sample of companies through longitudinal case studies, to further explain how these pilots can be executed successfully.

Sustainable business model innovation and ethics: A conceptual review from the institutional theory addressing (un)sustainability

Being this a period when human activities and creations profoundly alter many geological conditions and processes, here we conceptualise how the sustainable innovation of business models acts as yet another lever for the dissemination of human misbehaviours against the planet and its ecosystems. Departing from the Institutional Theory approach to entrepreneurship and sustainability, we identified institutional and ethical standards and norms that allow a better understanding of the institutional logic behind sustainable business model (SBM) innovation, how it is formed and its consequences in terms of inequity, oppression and exclusion. We have linked those standards with 12 constructs that can guide further empirical analyses; incubators, trainers, investors and policy makers could use them to support entrepreneurs avoid planet challenges and enhance human and non-human ecosystems.

Investigating business model innovation for sustainability: cases from Thailand

Business model innovation for sustainability is increasingly being recognised as a key to delivering and generating economic, social, and environmental sustainability through a firm's thinking and actions. As empirical exploration has largely focused on developed countries, there is a research gap in how this may provide sustainability within emerging market contexts. We aimed at investigating the key characteristics and mechanisms that were driving business model innovation for sustainability and how these elements contributed to sustainability in emerging markets. Our research was drawn from two case studies in Thailand where data were collected from diverse primary and secondary sources. The findings indicated that social value embeddedness that was in firms' value propositions by co-producing it with economic value propositions, collaboration and involvement with non-profit organisations (NPOs) and/or local communities to create shared value, and financial self-sustainability, were important keys to business model innovation to attain sustainability.

Investigating business model innovation for sustainability: cases from Thailand

Business model innovation for sustainability is increasingly being recognised as a key to delivering and generating economic, social, and environmental sustainability through a firm's thinking and actions. As empirical exploration has largely focused on developed countries, there is a research gap in how this may provide sustainability within emerging market contexts. We aimed at investigating the key characteristics and mechanisms that were driving business model innovation for sustainability and how these elements contributed to sustainability in emerging markets. Our research was drawn from two case studies in Thailand where data were collected from diverse primary and secondary sources. The findings indicated that social value embeddedness that was in firms' value propositions by co-producing it with economic value propositions, collaboration and involvement with non-profit organisations (NPOs) and/or local communities to create shared value, and financial self-sustainability, were important keys to business model innovation to attain sustainability.

Customer relationship management: digital transformation and sustainable business model innovation

The point of departure for this study is the understanding of customer relationship management (CRM) as a set of technological solutions key for efficient business management, the benefits of which, highlighted by previous works, are presented and defined here as crucial for entrepreneurial success. Of particular interest for this purpose are the existing studies on sustainability, which provide a viable research model to assess and validate the potential effect of each CRM component (sales, marketing, and services) on the three dimensions of sustainability (economic, environmental, and social). Upon confirmation of our hypotheses, the subsequent validation of such model should bring a better understanding of the way in which CRM-related benefits may increase the positive impact of its components on each dimension of sustainability. CRM can hence be considered a sort of Green IT, oriented toward digital transformation and sustainable business model innovation. Indeed, this research model may be the basis for a more specific methodology to measure the impact and benefits of applying CRM, understood, as we will contend, both in terms of sustainable business models and innovation.

Digital age business model innovation for sustainability in University Industry Collaboration Model

This study aims to investigate a digitalization-related business model as a result from the university-SME collaboration. The SME of the case study (Preventos Informatics Ltd) specializes in water distribution systems in industrial scale, telemetry, and sensor data-based monitoring of the water distribution. The business model of the company is a result of an innovation process during 2016-2017. The SME was established 2018. This study examines the commercialization process’s success factors and compares the original business model to the finally implemented one after two years. The study reviews the current literature of sustainable business models and digitalization and reflects the results from this study. Based on the results, by quantifying the sustainability, environmental aspects and digitalization, value added can be brought to the business model. Our study suggests that by adding more digitalization, sensor technologies, and dataanalysis, quantifying the real value of innovations is possible.

A multi objective optimization of sustainable business model innovation strategies regarding the challenges of new and emerging technologies in service business

A multi objective optimization of sustainable business model innovation strategies regarding the challenges of new and emerging technologies in service business

Barriers and drivers to sustainable business model innovation: Organization design and dynamic capabilities

Sustainable business model innovation (SBMI) in large multinational corporations is increasingly perceived as a key driver for competitive advantage and corporate sustainability. While the SBMI literature acknowledges that corporations require dynamic capabilities to innovate their business model for sustainability, the role of organization design to nurture dynamic capabilities for this purpose has been scantly addressed. By taking a qualitative research approach, we address how organization design affects dynamic capabilities needed for SBMI. Accordingly, from an organization design perspective, we identified barriers and drivers on three levels: the institutional, the strategic, and the operational. The contributions of our study are threefold. First, we contribute to a recent discussion on how organizational design affects dynamic capabilities needed for business model innovation. Second, we present a multi-level framework to show how interconnected barriers and drivers obstruct or enable SBMI. Third, our study answers a call to advance theoretical perspectives on SBMI.

Sustainable business model innovation: The role of boundary work for multi-stakeholder alignment

This study focuses on the boundary-spanning nature of sustainable business model innovation, studying multi-stakeholder engagement and alignment. Drawing on the concept of boundary work, we explore the different types of organizational boundary changes between focal companies and their external stakeholders, investigating specifically the process of exploring, negotiating, disrupting and realigning organizational boundaries. Based on an exploratory study of nine different sustainable business model initiatives from for-profit and non-profit organizations, our analysis shows how actors involved need to find alignment at normative, instrumental and strategic dimensions in order to achieve sustainable value creation. However, complexity for alignment emerges through different understandings of value, diverging interests, division of risks and responsibilities, and existing processes and activities that limits actors’ openness to align. Mutual boundary changes are thus necessary in the process of multi-stakeholder engagement in order to enhance organizations’ understanding of value and to capture the envisioned value. This paper functions as an agenda-setting paper, presenting first insights on how the boundary work lens can advance our understanding of alignment processes between focal organizations and their external stakeholders, required for sustainable business model innovation.

Track 4.f Introduction: Strategic Design of Sustainable Business Models

Concerns about the societal and environmental impact of how companies operate have generated increasing interest in more sustainable ways of doing business (Porter & Kramer, 2011). Research and practice from the past decade show that a Sustainable Business Model Innovation lens is suitable to embed sustainability into firms’ objectives and operations (Bocken et al., 2014; Schaltegger, Lüdeke-Freund, & Hansen, 2012). Consequently, Sustainable Business Model Innovation has been emerging rapidly as a research field (Lüdeke-Freund & Dembek, 2017). Recent developments in this field build upon seminal work on Design for Sustainability from the past two decades to establish a connection with Strategic Design (Baldassarre et al., 2019; Geissdoerfer et al., 2016; Manzini, 1999; Tukker, 2004). Strategic Design is a research stream that studies how to leverage the discipline of Design in the context of Strategy and Innovation Management (Calabretta et al., 2016; Karpen, Gemser, & Calabretta, 2017). More specifically, it focuses on the application of design practices, principles and methods to the formulation and implementation of innovation strategies that benefit people and organizations alike (Calabretta et al., 2016). The connection between Sustainable Business Model Innovation and Strategic Design is mainly supported by the argument that the strategic and experimental nature of design enables the integration of stakeholders’ objectives including sustainability concerns, while also providing the process dimension needed to move away from theory towards concrete practice and tangible impact (Baldassarre et al., 2017; Bocken, Schuit, & Kraaijenhagen, 2018). However, research on the role and contribution of Strategic Design to Sustainable Business Modeling is still in its infancy. Consequently, within this track of the 2019 edition of the Academy for Design Innovation Management Conference, we collected four research contributions at the intersection between Strategic Design and Sustainable Business Model Innovation. These contributions are summarized in the paragraphs below, followed by a reflection on all of them and potential directions for future research.

Service Blueprint for Sustainable Business Model Evaluation

The adverse societal impacts caused by sharing mobility - a form of service-based sustainable business model innovations, showed that operation activities and managerial practices impact heavily on the sustainable value of a service offering. To identify how new service development (NSD) activities can better support the proposed service offering for sustainability, evaluating sustainability of service operations is needed. This study draws learnings from service design, product-service system and sustainable innovation research streams, to build sustainability evaluation framework into service blueprint. Six expert-interviews and two mobility case studies were developed, to illustrate service blueprint's capability in mapping sustainability input and benefits created during NSD and service operation activities. Results revealed a) the shift from using sustainable ‘value’ to ‘benefits’ concept in service operation evaluation, b) the public-private collaboration dilemma and c) the agile NSD and sustainable innovation incompatibility. This paper aims to offer a springboard for practitioners and researchers to uncover compelling insights, discuss latest service design developments, and envision future directions for integrating sustainability into service-based business model innovation

The Evolution of Sustainable Business Model Innovation: Evidence from a Sharing Economy Platform in China

In this paper, we explore the emergence of Sheke Network (SKN), an architecture design company whose network platform permits architecture design institutes to seek suitable architects for their architectural design projects. The concepts of sustainable business model (SBM) innovation are used to analyze the SKN’s novel business model, which is built around modern internet technologies, and SKN’s distinct appeal, which centers on cost savings, resource sharing, and the potential for access to more architects’ experiences. Although SBM innovation theory has had a significant impact on management practices and aroused plenty of rich debate within academia, it is still not clearly understood how a company might successfully build a sharing economy (SE) platform using SBM innovation. Thus, this article analyzes the process of SBM innovation in terms of its three essential factors—sustainable value proposition (SVP), sustainable value creation and delivery (SVC&D), and sustainable value capture (SVC)—aiming to disambiguate the black box by examining SKN as a case study. The findings highlight the dynamic evolution of SBM innovation in the development of a sharing economy platform.

Business Model Innovation for Sustainability: Barriers and Solutions

Sustainable business model innovation can be seen as a key driver for sustainability transitions and competitive advantage in large established organizations. Despite the interest in sustainable bu...

Sustainable business model innovation and acceptance of its practices among Spanish entrepreneurs

AbstractSustainable business model innovation debate is mostly focusing on the use of certain practices and tools to implement sustainable objectives in new firms. Our paper contributes to this debate examining the factors influencing the entrepreneur's election of the practices to develop sustainable business model innovation (SBMI). We conducted an empirical analysis on a population of Spanish entrepreneurs (N = 234) and applied a sound behavioral framework and the PLS‐SEM algorithms to factor out those elements. On the basis of this analysis, we argue that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, hedonic motivation, habit, costs, speed, funding, and security and behavioral intention might affect the entrepreneurial acceptance of the practices leading to SBMI. We also argue that the knowledge of these factors benefit incubators, mentors, and agencies balance them into their support to sustainable business development. Our analyses open a novel research line by studying those factors influencing entrepreneurial use of sustainable innovation practices and facilitating future development of full‐scale models explaining this usage.

Strategies, practices, and tensions in managing business model innovation for sustainability: The case of an Australian BCorp

AbstractThis article provides new insights into sustainable innovation through the lens of business model innovation for sustainability. The article presents a case study of a new and underexplored business model for sustainability, the BCorp model. BCorps are profit‐orientated businesses certified to meet rigorous standards in relation to environmental and social performance, accountability, and transparency. This article examines the strategy, structure, and practices of an Australian BCorp and the tensions in reconciling economic, social, and environmental imperatives. The study found that the BCorp focuses on the social and economic aspects, with environmental performance only just recently being addressed in response to its poor performance on the environmental categories in the BCorp certification process. The social and economic aspects are strongly integrated in some practices (e.g., recruitment and marketing), but trying to balance these two has created tensions and conflict in other areas (e.g., ownership structure, performance measurement, sales, and product design). The study contributes to understanding the structures, strategies, and practices that facilitate sustainable innovation initiatives, the tensions that arise, and how they are managed.

Coworking and Sustainable Business Model Innovation in Young Firms

In larger cities, we see a rising trend of more people working outside their traditional offices, and engaging in a practice called co-working by sharing office space. The public policy makers of innovation-driven economies, on the other hand, have been availing co-working spaces and related support to promote innovation and entrepreneurship. Despite the growing significance of this area, there has been limited research on the link between coworking and innovation among young firms. This research examines the relationship between coworking space and innovation, particularly business model innovation (BMI) for sustainable performance. Based on an empirical study of 258 young tenant firms operating in 13 coworking spaces in Singapore, we establish that the space creativity of coworking spaces is positively related to the BMI outcome of tenant firms. Tenant firms’ opportunity recognition and exploitation (ORE) process positively mediates the relationship between the space creativity of coworking spaces and the BMI outcome of tenant firms. While the social climate of the coworking space is found to have no direct effect on the BMI outcome of tenant firms, tenant firms’ ORE process positively mediates the relationship between the social climate of coworking spaces and the sustainable BMI outcome of tenant firms.

Advancing transformative sustainability: A comparative analysis of electricity service and supply innovators in the United States

The electricity sector is undergoing rapid and dramatic change. The momentum of sustainable energy technologies and business model innovation is giving rise to a “polycentric” framework of policy innovation and action organized by institutions that support customer choice and give customers the means to become electricity generators and service providers in their own right. These local experiments will have to deliver transformative change, flexibly address the electricity sector's legacy of political and administrative complexity, achieve scale and financial sustainability, and enable greater and wider stakeholder participation and choice. This article reviews the evidence to date of the importance of these experiments and examines three innovators—municipal utilities, community choice aggregators, and the sustainable energy utility—to gauge the capacity of pioneers to address climate‐driven and other challenges in the electricity market.This article is categorized under: Energy Efficiency > Economics and Policy Energy Infrastructure > Economics and Policy Energy Efficiency > Systems and Infrastructure