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

Circular economy inspired imaginaries for sustainable innovations

In this chapter, Narayan and Tidström draw on the concept of imaginaries to show how Circular Economy (CE) can facilitate values that enable sustainable innovation. Innovation is key for sustainability, however, understanding and implementing sustainable innovation is challenging, and identifying the kind of actions that could direct sustainable innovations is important. The findings of this study indicate that CE-inspired imaginaries enable collaboration and by relating such imaginaries to common and shared social and cultural values, intermediaries could motivate actors into taking actions that contribute to sustainable innovation.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Online Platforms and the Circular Economy

Online platforms have a growing influence on how people interact with the physical world. They organise data streams, economic interactions and social exchanges of their users. Competitive dynamics in this emerging ‘platform society’ revolve around the ability to attract users to a platform, and to collect and analyse data from their interactions to achieve network effects. This chapter is about the roles of online platforms in enabling a more sustainable and circular economy. It identifies and describes three potential roles: they can enable people and organisations to (1) market, (2) operate and (3) co-create products, components and material. The identified roles provide a playground for firms to experiment with online platforms to advance their digital transition towards a circular economy.</p

Developing sustainable business experimentation capability: A case study

This research paper shows how a firm pursues innovation activities for economic, social and environmental value creation in the context of time sensitivity. We make a conceptual link between lean startup thinking, triple bottom line value creation, and organizational capabilities. The case study firm uses a novel experimentation approach to pursue the goal of diverting all of its sold clothing from landfill through a two-year project. This requires substantial changes to the current business practice because in 2012, the clothing retailer recovered 1% of all garments sold. The fibre input value for all garments sold in 2012 exceeded $7m. We found that despite a stated need for fast learning through project experiments, the experiments were not executed quickly. (1) The desire to plan project activities and the lack of lean startup approach expertise across the whole project team hampered fast action. This led to the extension of the project timeline. However, project team confidence about learning by doing increasedthrough privately executed experiments. (2) Some project experiments were not fit to meet the triple bottom value creation project goal and were dropped from the project. Overall, the corporate mindset of economic value creation still dominated.Circular Product Desig

Sustainable Business Models through Service Design

In the face of growing sustainability challenges, pressure on businesses to decouple environmental impacts from growth is mounting. New sustainable business models can be a systemic driver for change in industry and the wider business innovation literature suggests that strategic design approaches can be at the heart of business model innovation. One such approach, service design, involves solving problems through a service response, which unlocks value for each stakeholder in a value chain. Nevertheless, the value of service design to sustainable business is still often overlooked. Through a literature review and five illustrative case studies this paper systematically analyses how businesses can leverage service design for sustainable business model innovation. The research highlights how service design can support sustainable business model innovation by uncovering strategic as well as operational synergies between these complementary fields.Circular Product Desig

Sustainable business model experimentation by understanding ecologies of business models

Sustainable business model innovation is about creating superior customer and firm value by addressing societal and environmental needs through the way business is done. Business models require intentional design if they are to deliver aspired sustainability impacts. Scant research has been done on ‘ecologies’ of different business models in order to understand and improve these and create positive impact on the environment, society, economy and other key stakeholders. Hence, in this paper a novel framework is presented to enable a systemic form of sustainable business model experimentation. The framework is based on the recognition of three key issues which have not yet been sufficiently incorporated in the literature on sustainable business models: construct clarity, boundary setting and uncertainty about outcomes. These concepts are discussed first. Building on earlier work, the resulting framework incorporates potential side-effects and boundary setting based on the concept of an ‘ecology of business models’. Second, an approach is proposed that could stimulate more profound forms of sustainable business model innovation: The Ecology of Business Models Experimentation map. Third, the approach is illustrated through two cases. The approach could help minimise symbiotic dependency on less sustainable business models; help destroy unsustainable business models by outcompeting them; and maximise contributions to favourable institutional infrastructures for more sustainable business models. This paper contributes to research on sustainable business model innovation, design and experimentation by providing a potential approach for ‘business model ecology redesign’.</p

Sustainable business model archetypes for the banking industry

Sustainable business model innovation is increasingly viewed as a lever for systems change for sustainability across businesses and industries. Banks hold a unique intermediary role in sustainable development, but also have a difficult position after the 2008 financial crisis. This paper aims to explore business models for sustainability in the service industry, particularly banking. It explores the receptiveness of customers towards sustainable business models pursued by banks. The retail banking industry in Hong Kong is the focus of this work. First, a practice review and semi-structured interviews are used to develop and validate a set of sustainable business model archetypes for the banking industry. Second, surveys are conducted to test customer receptiveness for the archetypes. Eight sustainable business model archetypes for banking are developed and validated. “Substitute with digital processes” “adopt a stewardship role” and “encourage sufficiency” are most welcomed by customers. Some archetypes seem at direct odds with current business practice, such as “encourage sufficiency”. This study gives an insight to how to “do good and do well” in the banking industry. Further research on the attributes of these archetypes can be conducted to gain a deeper understanding why customers prefer banks to use these archetypes.Marketing and Consumer Researc