Sustainability-oriented business model development: principles, criteria and tools

• DOI: 10.1504/ijev.2018.10013801
• Publication Date: 2018-06-13T13:27:16Z
• Authors: Irina Tiemann; Henning Breuer; Klaus Fichter; Florian Lüdeke Fr...
• Keywords: 9. Industry and infrastructure; 11. Sustainability; 0502 economics and business; 05 social sciences; 12. Responsible consumption

A shared understanding of the basic requirements for modelling sustainability-oriented business is currently missing. This is hindering collaboration, exchange and learning about sustainability-oriented business models as well as the development of suitable and widely-accepted modelling tools. We contribute toward such a shared understanding based on a theoretical discussion of boundary-spanning and interactive business model development for sustainable value creation. The theoretical discussion feeds into a comparative analysis of the six currently available practitioner tools supporting the exploration and elaboration of sustainability-oriented business models. By synthesising findings from theory and available tools, we define four guiding principles (sustainability-orientation, extended value creation, systemic thinking and stakeholder integration) and four process-related criteria (reframing business model components, context-sensitive modelling, collaborative modelling, managing impacts and outcomes) for the development of sustainability-oriented business models.