Abstract
Business models for sustainability (BMfS) enable organizations to create social and environmental value for a wide variety of stakeholders. As BMfS are new for well-established industries, their implementation requires deep organizational change to overcome path dependencies of existing business models. In this article, we present a framework which outlines the organizational change process involved in BMfS development. The framework shows that organizations can experiment with novel configurations of value, resources, and transactions, and follow discursive and cognitive pathways to enable BMfS legitimization and implementation. Although the value, resources, and transactions levers can be used either separately or in concert, discursive and cognitive pathways are most powerful when pursued together. We use our framework to highlight the contributions of the articles in the special issue and to propose new directions for BMfS research. We argue that future research should investigate the impacts of BMfS on the sustainability challenges they seek to address.
Introduction
Corporate sustainability research has fully embraced the business model concept to explain how organizations are seeking to address sustainability (Schaltegger et al., 2016) and suggest alternative pathways for organizing (natural) resources and activities to become “truly sustainable” (Dyllick & Muff, 2016; Upward & Jones, 2016). The literature on business models for sustainability (BMfS) has grown fast and practically surpassed previous work on business strategies for sustainability in terms of the quantity of research published (see Bocken et al., 2014; Boons & Lüdeke-Freund, 2014). Developing and implementing BMfS is considered the go-to approach for organizations to achieve social and environmental goals and to reduce adverse impacts as expressed in some BMfS definitions. For example, a BMfS facilitates the process of
describing, analyzing, managing, and communicating (i) a company’s sustainable value proposition to its customers, and all other stakeholders, (ii) how it creates and delivers this value, (iii) and how it captures economic value while maintaining or regenerating natural, social, and economic capital beyond its organizational boundaries. (Schaltegger et al., 2016, p. 6)
However, while strategies are inherently flexible and move in conjunction with changes in the competitive environment in anticipation of competitors’ moves, business models are less flexible. For instance, changing from producing and selling goods to providing services is a radical change for most organizations. Seminal studies on business models have shown how difficult it was for established organizations like Polaroid (Tripsas & Gavetti, 2000) and Xerox (Chesbrough & Rosenbloom, 2002) to move away from a dominant business model like the razor-and-blade model. Pursuing corporate sustainability through BMfS is challenging, too, and seldom supported by all organizational members ranging from the top management to middle managers and employees.
As business models are relatively inflexible, making them more sustainable is complicated (Bohnsack et al., 2014). Established business models are deeply embedded in the minds of managers and there tends to be agreement within a given industry what the most successful way of doing business is (Baden-Fuller & Morgan, 2010; Sabatier et al., 2010). Business model change and innovation are highly path-dependent as they are tied to dominant logics (Chesbrough & Rosenbloom, 2002), and changing BMfS in mature industries such as the automotive and energy industry has proven very difficult (Bohnsack et al., 2014; Vernay et al., 2022). It involves deep organizational change because BMfS require organizations to reimagine the concept of value by reorienting the organization toward socially and environmentally sustainable outcomes, to change the resources that underpin the value creation process, and to engage in transactions with a broader set of stakeholders (Carrasco-Farré et al., 2022; Freudenreich et al., 2020; Neesham et al., 2023; Upward & Jones, 2016). To understand what it means for organizations to develop BMfS and either make them the new core of their business or an integral part of the business model portfolio (Dentchev et al., 2018; Snihur & Tarzijan, 2018), insight is needed into the related organizational change processes. Sustainability research has started to develop systems theories of BMfS (Starik et al., 2016; Stubbs & Cocklin, 2008) and sustainable value creation (Freudenreich et al., 2020; Neesham et al., 2023; Upward & Jones, 2016), but “the question of how managers can innovate their [business models] toward greater sustainability has not been addressed sufficiently to date” (Foss & Saebi, 2017, p. 221). A theoretical explanation of this process would not only help developing the BMfS field further (Lüdeke-Freund & Dembek, 2017) but also allow understanding organizational dynamics and change as important antecedents and consequences of moving toward BMfS.
In this article, we develop a conceptual framework that explains the organizational levers and pathways involved in BMfS implementation and legitimization. To change established business models and transform them into BMfS, we propose that organizations have three levers of change at their disposal: value, resources, and transactions (George & Bock, 2011). These levers can be leveraged through two pathways—discursive and cognitive—to enable BMfS implementation in the organization and legitimization in the field. By fostering change in the industry discourse and managerial cognition regarding sustainability, BMfS enable organizations to unlock new sources of value that are more likely to accrue to a wide variety of stakeholders rather than to the focal organization and its shareholders only. Discursive and cognitive pathways to achieve change are most powerful when pursued together; following only the discursive or only the cognitive pathway might lead to unintended consequences such as accusations of greenwashing or developing BMfS that remain on the margins of an organization’s business model portfolio.
In the remainder of this article, we first explain our framework and unpack its main components. We then use the framework to highlight the contributions of the special issue articles and to propose new directions for BMfS research firmly anchored in organization theory.
Conceptual Framework of BMfS Processes
We developed our framework—Figure 1—based on the articles included in this special issue and based on prior work. The framework connects the levers of BMfS change with the pathways and two outcomes: the legitimization of BMfS in the field and the implementation of BMfS in the focal organization. The framework highlights that the BMfS change process can originate with value, resources, and transactions levers that can separately or in concert drive BMfS legitimization and implementation. It also highlights recursive links between the discursive and cognitive pathways for change and between field legitimization and organizational implementation, the two key outcomes of the change process.
Conceptual Framework of BMfS Change Processes.
In our framework, we follow George and Bock’s (2011) conceptualization of business models and distinguish between changes in three “VRT” levers for BMfS: (a)
Levers for BMfS Change Process: Value, Resources, and Transactions
Our key assertion is that implementing BMfS requires organizational change, but why is this the case? How are BMfS different from traditional business models? And what kind of organizational change do BMfS entail as a result? To create insight into this organizational change, we must first unpack what underpins the change process. To do so, we draw on George and Bock’s (2011) work distinguishing three levers: value, resources, and transactions (VRT). Building on existing business model perspectives (Teece, 2010; Zott & Amit, 2010), George and Bock (2011) consider business models as configurations of resources which are connected through boundary-spanning transactions to create, deliver, and capture value. Although business models are underpinned by all three levers (value, resources, transactions), they argue that each business model is unique depending on the dominant lever. For example, where social enterprises aim for social value creation (Santos, 2012), the business model of pharmaceutical firms is built on exploiting exclusive intellectual property as a key resource (George & Bock, 2011), and digital platforms seek to enable peer-to-peer transactions (Ricart et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2020). Hence, depending on the respective focus, a different type of organizational change is required for a move toward BMfS. We use this VRT backbone to identify the levers for BMfS implementation and legitimization.
The
There is considerable variation among BMfS in how much emphasis is put on unlocking new sources of value. Even though all BMfS are almost by definition built on the premise that they create social and environmental value for a range of stakeholders (Freudenreich et al., 2020), it is common for organizations to follow an instrumental logic with their BMfS (van Bommel, 2018), where social and environmental value are a means to an end (profits for shareholders), not an end in itself (Hahn et al., 2015). In contrast, hybrid organizational forms such as social enterprises, B Corporations, and cooperatives put social and environmental value at the core of the business model as they aim to create solidarity and maximize impact, not profits (Haigh & Hoffman, 2014). For B Corporations, for example, “[p]rofits are a means to achieve positive social and environmental ends” (Stubbs, 2017, p. 332). Such a value concept changes the normative underpinning of an organization’s objectives, what constitutes value, and for whom it is created (Neesham et al., 2023; Randles & Laasch, 2016). As shareholder primacy and economic value creation are so deeply embedded in the institutional fabric of capitalist society, changing a business model’s value focus is the most challenging organizational change that might need care in both BMfS legitimization and implementation within or outside the organization concerned. For example, BMfS that make social and environmental value creation an organization’s core objective challenge existing norms of shareholder primacy. Instead, they aim to address the needs of other stakeholders such as indigenous groups, local communities, or employees (Neesham et al., 2023). These changes might require both explanation and nudges to adapt managerial thinking to implement them effectively within the organization.
A business model’s
Using renewable resources involves business model change or innovation because such resources tend to have different characteristics that prevent replacing them like-for-like. For example, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar are intermittent forms of electricity generation and require business models that offer customer solutions for upfront capital provision, maintenance, and energy storage (Pereira et al., 2022). When alternative resources are used, certain product properties change, which requires customers to alter how they use the product (Pinkse & Bohnsack, 2021). To incentivize behavioral change of customers, BMfS often involve servitization to improve functionality and help customers use the product in the most sustainable way (Bocken et al., 2014; Tukker, 2004). When changing resources, organizations also need to develop or acquire new capabilities for the provision of new services such as smart energy solutions (Pereira et al., 2022). Such changes in resource configurations influence other business model aspects, including sourcing, production processes, product design as well, and use- and end-of-life phases in the consumption process. While these changes are systematically described as BMfS ideal-types, archetypes, and patterns (Bocken et al., 2014; Lüdeke-Freund et al., 2018, 2019; Stubbs & Cocklin, 2008), to implement and legitimize them, organizations need to discuss and think through the numerous implications involved inside and outside the organization.
A business model’s
When organizations change a business model’s transactions, they also change who they collaborate with and engage in (or enable) new types of transactional relationships. Digital platforms and marketplaces not only change a business model’s revenue streams by relying on subscription or commission, for example (Lüdeke-Freund et al., 2018), but they also tend to utilize novel incentives for platform users such as building new social relationships (Zhang et al., 2020) or contributing to environmental improvements (Acquier et al., 2017). The importance of such collaborations and new transactional relationships is mostly considered in stakeholder-oriented streams of BMfS research that emphasize that collaboration and transactions are embedded in mutually beneficial stakeholder relationships (Ricart et al., 2020). The diversity of these relationships allows organizations to identify and develop transactions with the potential to create “sustainable value” (Freudenreich et al., 2020). However, to implement changes in transactions, such as platformization, both explanation and thinking are needed, for instance to ensure network effects and to put in place coherent incentives for different stakeholders to participate.
We thus discuss next two pathways for BMfS change that emerged from the special issue articles: discursive and cognitive pathways.
Pathways for BMfS Change
Whether BMfS change originates in a change in the value, resources, or transactions, what these change processes have in common is the need to overcome path dependencies and rigidities, such as a dominant commercial logic, fixed complementary assets, and existing relationships (Bohnsack et al., 2014). The special issue articles show how organizations, and their managers, can follow discursive and cognitive pathways, or combine them, to overcome path dependencies and legitimize BMfS in the eyes of stakeholders within their fields and internal organizations. Discursive and cognitive pathways both help with BMfS legitimization in the field and BMfS implementation in the organization through discursive explanations and cognitive schema expansion to include pressing sustainability concerns. Table 1 provides an overview of the special issue articles, and it identifies the levers, pathways, and outcomes of the BMfS change process for each article’s empirical case.
Levers, Pathways, and Outcomes Discussed in Special Issue Articles.
V = Value; R = Resources; T = Transactions; D = Discursive; C = Cognitive; L = Legitimization; I = Implementation; BMfS = business models for sustainability.
Discursive Pathways
Discursive pathways help to update the BMfS’ sustainability emphasis and compatibility with existing business models through careful explanation to mobilize support for change. Over the past two decades, for example, advocates of hydrogen have shifted from lobbying for hydrogen as a way to decarbonize mobility (Romm, 2004) to portraying it as a solution to decarbonize industrial processes instead (Rissman et al., 2020). For such a mobilization of support to be successful, it is important to enact an alteration of the discourse on sustainability and to legitimize BMfS to various stakeholders inside and outside the organization. Discourse refers to the impact on social reality of how a subject is discussed and framed in written or spoken narratives (Phillips et al., 2004). How the discourse around a business model evolves is important for legitimacy because “discourses make certain ways of thinking and acting possible, and others impossible or costly” (Phillips et al., 2004, p. 638). Organizations gain support for BMfS by changing the field and industry discourse (DiVito et al., 2023) and by explaining to stakeholders what they can expect regarding sustainability (Vernay et al., 2022). Organizations use discursive approaches to alter the blueprint of the purpose of business (Sabatier et al., 2010) and explain how this translates into a change in the value, resources, and transactions involved (Blackburn et al., 2023; DiVito et al., 2023; Olesson et al., 2023).
Organizations following discursive pathways to legitimize BMfS, and to get support for their implementation, face a balancing act between addressing the needs of stakeholders who expect them to deliver sustainability and those who expect them to deliver financial performance (Laasch, 2018). Implementing BMfS complicates formulating a distinctive, yet legitimate value proposition (Vernay et al., 2022), because BMfS seek not just to create value for customers but also to deliver value for a wider set of stakeholders (Schaltegger et al., 2016). Although sustainable value propositions draw on various economic, social, and environmental value levers simultaneously, organizations need to develop a narrative which addresses the expectations of different stakeholder groups (Laasch, 2018). In their study of a utility using an internal corporate venture to offer electric mobility services, Reuter and Krauspe (2023) found that the venture’s project team initially faced resistance from top management when they launched a value proposition that offered charging services from green electricity only. Top management considered the “green” value proposition a threat because it could hinder scaling the business model. The project team decided to discursively reframe this perceived threat into an opportunity instead by offering “holistic charging solutions” which were less constrained in their focus on sustainability.
By contrast, DiVito et al. (2023) found that organizations in the global fashion industry felt compelled to reframe the discourse around their BMfS’ value proposition because it was not sustainable enough. Over time, industry incumbents experimented with different value propositions for circularity to maintain legitimacy. They repeatedly reframed the discourse around circularity to address concerns about the industry driving overconsumption and excessive waste, while limiting the need to implement practices that would involve a radical departure from their existing business model. At first, the incumbents framed the value proposition around recycling using closed-loop systems such as in-store textile collection and take-back schemes, thus reusing their own resources. However, they were criticized for only recycling a small fraction. In response, the incumbents reframed the circularity discourse to recycling using open-loop systems and source plastic waste such as PET bottles from adjacent industries. While the implementation of open-loop systems was more scalable and compatible with the existing business model, it failed to close within-industry resource loops and perpetuated overproduction. The incumbents then changed the discourse again to a more holistic view of circularity which also included renting, swapping, and reselling of textiles. Interestingly, in the process of changing their BMfS, the industry incumbents mainly relied on the resource lever by drawing on different resources over time, both from within and outside, while the promised value of delivering circularity remained largely unchanged. Nonetheless, each discursive turn was performative for BMfS implementation as different framings led to different circular practices being implemented.
In their study of digital circular economy platforms, Blackburn et al. (2023) show that developing a discourse that attracts actors to transact resources on their platform and create circular value can also involve all three VRT levers. They found that the platforms developed a discourse around circular value creation which addresses economic and circularity objectives simultaneously to enable and increase the exchange of resources between different actors and to enable transactions and scale up network effects. While network effects create economic value for participating actors, the associated potential for better resource matchmaking can contribute to environmental value creation as it puts resources going to waste back into circulation. The platforms also used sustainability branding to develop a strong identity to attract actors interested in environmental value creation and legitimize their platform to stakeholders expecting them to deliver sustainability. To discursively align their value creation with circularity, platforms introduced new notions related to all three VRT levers such as “resource matchmaking,” “retaining value,” and “reducing market inefficiencies.” These notions shaped the discourse around digital circular business models in a way that emphasizes the advantages for both the environment and business. The study shows how establishing such notions in processes of public identity building and legitimization not only contributes to establishing a shared language to denote and positively connotate digital circular business models but also to envisioning new strategies and business cases that can be derived from the logic of “resource matchmaking.”
In sum, when organizations use value, resources, and transactions levers for the BMfS change process, discursive pathways help to explain and update sustainability emphasis and its compatibility with the existing business model(s) of the organization. Yet, when incumbents shape the discourse around BMfS to prevent radical organizational change, path dependencies are not fully overcome (Bohnsack et al., 2014). Their influence on the discourse makes certain BMfS be seen as practically impossible, or too costly. A change in thinking (cognition) might be required in addition to the discursive approach to enable quicker implementation and broader consideration and search for effective BMfS.
Cognitive Pathways
Cognitive pathways help to update the BMfS’ sustainability emphasis and compatibility with existing business models by changing people’s mental models of sustainability (Hahn et al., 2014). Cognition refers to the mental process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought (Walsh, 1995). As many BMfS are still new, designing them effectively requires careful thinking and learning to improve their viability and facilitate implementation. Research on business models points to the importance of thinking to enable experimentation and identification of advantageous resources required for new business models under conditions of high uncertainty and technological change (Snihur & Eisenhardt, 2022; Snihur & Zott, 2020). Cognitive pathways help revise managerial business model schemas—that is, “concepts and relations among them that organize managerial understandings about the design of activities and exchanges that reflect the critical interdependencies and value creation relations in their firms’ exchange networks” (Martins et al., 2015, p. 105). This permits understanding of what legitimate business models are, thereby letting employees and managers envision and develop more innovative BMfS. Only if new BMfS are imagined, can their implementation proceed. In the absence of existing exemplars, cognitive pathways structure action to implement transformative change in industries where BMfS are not yet well developed. They change the mental models of employees, managers, and stakeholders about the purpose of business and the related changes in the value, resources, and transactions that might be undertaken or imagined.
Organizations following cognitive pathways to imagine and implement new BMfS, and legitimize them throughout the organization, first face the challenge of imagining what sustainability means for their business, or venture, and then of influencing others’ managerial cognition about sustainability. To develop sustainable value propositions, organizations tend to use conceptual combination: “the creation of new concepts that are variants of existing ones” [. . .] which makes it “particularly effective for creating new dimensions of value in existing business models” (Martins et al., 2015, p. 111). In their study of a professional services firm, Olesson et al. (2023) present a case where the organization reconfigures resources and capabilities around the exploitation of professional knowledge to enable the implementation of (incremental) sustainability additions to their business model. A change in expectations of customers and employees to make meaningful contributions to sustainability formed the starting point to develop new sustainability services. In developing these services, professional, commercial, and sustainability logics were combined which generated a set of cognitive enablers for reshaping the existing business model toward sustainability. Similarly, in their study of a telecommunications firm developing a business model for health services in Bangladesh, Ringvold et al. (2023) found that individuals involved in creating BMfS used their cognitive complexity and recombination capabilities to identify new opportunities for sustainable value creation. They found that these individuals had diverse backgrounds and used knowledge and experience from other industries. Along with their willingness to challenge the status quo, they transformed the thinking in the organization about what it meant to deliver a sustainable value proposition.
Cognitive pathways and the development of BMfS schemas not only emerge from individuals’ knowledge and experience but also from their interactions with others in the organization (Reuter & Krauspe, 2023; Ringvold et al., 2023). BMfS that emerge from within an existing organization can take advantage of the parent organization’s resources and capabilities as a resource lever. Ringvold et al. (2023) found that BMfS ideation and value proposition development benefited from resource sharing and collaboration with the parent organization to leverage their relevant knowledge and capabilities. The parent organization also provided organizational “slack” that let the BMfS first mature and improve its viability before requirements for monetization would take effect. This cognitive pathway of depending on others from within the organization is not unlike analogical reasoning which refers to using knowledge from one domain in another domain, where similarities between both domains lead to developing new solutions (Martins et al., 2015). However, analogical reasoning fails when the core problem is not the same, because it would lead to applying a business model that does not fully address the problem unique to a specific organization or industry (Snihur & Eisenhardt, 2022).
BMfS’ inherent novelty and the need to depart from existing business models hints at limits to leveraging an organization’s existing business model schemas for BMfS development. Olesson et al. (2023) identified several cognitive constraints in the professional services firm they studied which limited the potential of recombining professional, commercial, and sustainability logics for BMfS implementation. The existing business model’s reliance on professional autonomy and professional knowledge as core resources meant that professionals not keen to engage in sustainability activities could not be forced to participate. Moreover, while a change in customer expectations underpinned the firm’s move toward sustainability, being strongly customer-led also meant that the firm would not oblige existing customers to change their approach to sustainability and existing services would continue as per usual. Consequently, the firm only added new sustainability services as an add-on to its existing business model for customers who requested them, since it felt that changing existing services with an eye on sustainability was out of bounds. The combination of the existing business model’s resources and transactions continued to act as cognitive barrier for the implementation of more radical BMfS.
Interestingly, a clash between managerial business model schemas of individuals working on BMfS implementation and others in the organization invested in the existing business model can lead to new cognitive pathways for BMfS implementation, too. Reuter and Krauspe (2023) found that the reframing of threats into opportunities was not only used as a discursive approach to win over top management but also as a cognitive approach to use pushback from top management to revise thinking about various elements of the business model. The project team used the perceived threats to emerging BMfS to expand their own business model schemas. For example, they strategically reframed the threat of depending on a single supplier’s hardware as key resource into an opportunity to leverage the hardware’s value potential more fully by making the partnership stronger. Recognition of this resource’s unique role in their BMfS’ value creation led the project team to rethink the governance arrangement to manage transactions with this supplier.
In sum, cognitive pathways to BMfS stimulate managerial thinking to envision and develop BMfS, for instance, using conceptual combinations, analogies, or thinking in terms of opportunities (rather than threats) to better make sense of the required changes in the business model’s value, resources, and transactions. Cognitive pathways are important along with discursive pathways, because change is difficult when people do not understand or think through the implications. Thus, explanation (discourse) and thinking (cognition) are complementary and both are essential to the legitimization and effective implementation of BMfS, particularly in well-established industries with a long history of path-dependent choices and activities that might be harming the environment and using resources in inefficient or even wasteful ways.
Discussion and Research Agenda
Our framework (Figure 1), anchored in the special issue articles and in prior research, illustrates how organizations are experimenting with novel configurations of value, resources, and transactions that together enable BMfS legitimization and implementation in diverse industries ranging from electricity generation to health care and fashion. The framework offers a way of reducing complexity for analytical purposes by focusing on the major business model levers, likely pathways triggered by changes in these levers, and eventual outcomes of the BMfS change process. The framework’s elements and their relationships allow us to trace and analyze various BMfS change processes that emerge and evolve as they unfold. On the positive side, we are accumulating knowledge on the process of transformation during the journey toward sustainability, or how to do it in the form of new business models. At the same time, the changes in discourse and cognition described in the special issue articles are seldom fast or holistic enough, and we still know much less about the long-term impact of BMfS implementation. Future research is needed to more seriously address BMfS impacts.
First, although many BMfS efforts are currently underway in new and established organizations, we still lack rigorous evaluations of tangible changes, such as resources conserved or regenerated, due to these efforts. Although we recognize that BMfS efforts can take many years, some industries are more advanced in their transformation toward sustainability, and it would be fruitful to evaluate and learn from BMfS impacts already undertaken. Important avenues for future research include developing clearer notions of the effects BMfS can have. Value creation, impact, and system change are examples of notions that are often used to denote the effects attributed to BMfS development and implementation. In addition, it is often assumed that these effects are per se positive and desirable. Therefore, research is needed that helps to distinguish often-conflated notions and concepts such as performance, output, outcome, impact, and value (Dembek et al., 2023). These effects are related but not the same. This is important to consider: BMfS might have the potential to increase an organization’s performance and outputs, yet it is far more questionable whether they will also create social and environmental value or bring about system-level change (i.e., impact).
Second, our framework highlights the importance of the interwovenness of the discursive and cognitive pathways (Figure 1) and the special issue articles strongly suggest the presence of both pathways during BMfS change processes (Table 1). However, there are several cases of BMfS efforts where only discursive pathways prevail. In such instances, organizations might potentially legitimize certain BMfS, or even create hype around green, circular, or sustainable undertakings but without delivering on the promises of environmental or social value creation. A critical example from the past is the sharing economy and its new business models. These were often seen as a means to increase resource efficiency and inclusivity, whereas sharing has in many cases just become a kind of “access economy” based on scalable digital platforms with questionable implications for sustainability (Acquier et al., 2017). On the flipside, there will be cases, too, where only cognitive pathways prevail. Here, organizations implement BMfS in their own organization but a failure to also change the industry discourse could imply that the new business model gets stuck in the margins as it never influences other stakeholders beyond the organizational boundaries. Additional research is needed to address the potential dark side of legitimizing BMfS without reaching corresponding gains in terms of business changes required, and in terms of implementing BMfS without making discursive efforts to scale them up within or beyond the focal industry. This points to an important avenue for future research on the interplay of the cognitive and discursive pathways and the kinds of organizational and industry change they bring about or fail to do so.
Third, our framework can be applied at different levels of analysis. While most of the articles in the special issue have considered what happens within the organization, and our framework fits well to consider how value, resources, and transactions can be reconfigured at the organizational level, it can also be applied to industry or ecosystem levels of analysis. As such, the framework would be useful for policymakers to consider how to steer the transformation toward more sustainable economies (in addition to business models) through cognitive and discursive pathways. An important question is whether and how the discursive effects of overarching policy frameworks on different levels, ranging from the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to the European Green Deal and national industry programs, not only translate into new narratives but eventually also lead to new cognitive frames and corresponding organizational change (Di Vaio et al., 2020). The potential and limitations of such overarching frameworks to stimulate the development and implementation of new BMfS is a field of study that has not received sufficient attention. Future research could use our framework to consider the role of policymakers as important actors who can accelerate the pace of BMfS legitimization, implementation, and more widespread adoption across industries.
Fourth, future research should also consider the role of digital transformation for BMfS. While digital technologies may drive outcomes of BMfS (Di Maria et al., 2022), break path-dependent behavior (Bohnsack et al., 2021), and enable more sustainable development, they can also create new challenges. For instance, BMfS based on digital technologies may not be able to be adopted in geographies that lack the necessary digital infrastructure (Ciulli & Kolk, 2023), create unintended consequences (Bohnsack et al., 2022), and, with the latest advances in artificial intelligence (AI), will have an increasing influence on the agency of users. Future studies should explore how digital transformation influences the BMfS change processes outlined in our framework. The question arises, for example, whether BMfS should consider digital sustainability in the value lever, and it becomes increasingly relevant to understand how digital technologies influence pathways toward the implementation and legitimization of BMfS. Particularly, the new role of AI in the context of discursive pathways (e.g., being able to create millions of documents with a mouse click that shape perceptions) and cognitive pathways (e.g., what is perceived to be true if any document, video, or voice can be artificially created) demand attention.
Finally, BMfS research to date has far too rarely provided insight into more inconvenient, yet urgently needed BMfS innovations. Future research should go beyond the currently dominant “less-bad” type of BMfS which emphasizes a decrease in negative social and environmental impacts. For instance, circular BMfS reduce negative environmental impacts through increased reuse and efficiencies but do not restore the damage done. In addition, negative knock-on effects such as rebound effects and other forms of negatively overcompensating efficiency gains are hardly considered in BMfS research. More emphasis should be placed on regenerative business models that create positive social and environmental impacts and restore social and environmental capital and systems. Research could build on discussions about restorative and regenerative strategy and entrepreneurship (Hahn & Tampe, 2021; Muñoz & Branzei, 2021). Other inconvenient BMfS are those that fundamentally contradict the underlying tenets of “normal” business such as business models following notions of postgrowth and degrowth (Froese et al., 2023; Khmara & Kronenberg, 2018).
Despite widespread recognition that unlimited growth on a finite planet is impossible and the root cause of many sustainability problems (Steffen et al., 2015), there is yet limited discussion of the fundamental organizational transformations required to supplant the economic growth paradigm. Future BMfS research would do well to not only problematize the in-built growth tenet of business models but also critically explore what other taken-for-granted tenets need to be undone or replaced to generate truly sustainable business models.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author Biographies
was also awarded the best educational ICT tool 2019 by Wharton and QS.