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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.

https://doi.org/10.1177/10860266231176913

Abstract

How underlying norms influence the introduction of sustainability in existing commercial business models is under-researched. We present an ethnographic study of a professional services firm operating under commercial and professional logics and responding to the introduction of the sustainability logic. We find that different logic characteristics can be core in each business model component, leading to distinct enablers and barriers to change towards sustainability. We show how the alignment of practices between logics of responding to a specific client and employee expectations are enablers for sustainability. Conversely, barriers are created when clients or employees do not require action. We find enabled actions are bound by barriers of not being open to leading clients in sustainability, requiring professionals to integrate sustainability into service delivery, and taking on risk to shareholder returns. This study shows that logics and how they are expressed impact the antecedents of business model change for sustainability.

https://doi.org/10.1177/10860266231155210

Abstract

Digital platform technology enables circular business models that facilitate the reduction, reuse, and recycling of resources and materials across large ecosystems of platform actors. However, little is currently known about the inner workings of such platforms and how they are organized. Framing these platforms as meta-organizations, this study examines the orchestration mechanisms deployed by platform owners to facilitate economic value creation with a circular business model among a large group of actors. Building on an inductive analysis of 10 European platform organizations, this study identifies five meta-organizational orchestration mechanisms and develops an empirically grounded model that explains how the focal firm orchestrates value creation with a platform-based circular business model. This study advances the existing knowledge on orchestration mechanisms in platform-based meta-organizations in a circular economy context and highlights novel implications for theory and practice.

https://doi.org/10.1177/10860266221130717

Abstract

Established firms often develop new businesses through internal corporate venturing (ICV), for instance, to capture value from novel sustainable technologies. We illuminate the early definition stage of ICV's by asking: When and how business model schemas-that is, managerial understandings of how value is created and captured-change in ICV? We conduct a qualitative, embedded case study of the change in a business model schema for e-mobility in a Swiss utility's ICV. We uncover a key trigger: strategic re-framing-the active re-formulation of the definition of a given situation within ICV–top manager interactions. The strategic re-framing's specificity level provokes either schema restrictions or expansions via the distinct accommodation practices it induces. Our theoretical model of business model schema change contributes to the literatures on managerial cognition, business models, and ICV, suggesting that business model schema change in ICV is a semi-autonomous process that involves both independent and joint endeavors.

https://doi.org/10.1177/10860266221107645

Abstract

Sustainable business models (SBMs) integrate economic with social and/or environmental value creation. Many relevant aspects of organizing for sustainable business model innovation (SBMI) have yet to be accounted for to understand how firms can add a new SBM to their already existing portfolio of business models. Specifically, how the development of a new SBM is influenced by managers' cognitions, capabilities, behaviors, and interactions, and how the SBMI process can be supported by organizational processes and structures is less well understood. Taking a microfoundational approach, we identify the capabilities at the managerial and organizational level that enable established firms to add a new SBM to their business model portfolio. In a longitudinal study, we explore how Telenor, a multinational telecommunications company headquartered in Norway, introduced a new SBM targeted at providing digital health services in Bangladesh. We offer a framework that highlights key microfoundational elements supporting each of the phases in the SBMI process.

https://doi.org/10.1177/10860266221117250

Abstract

We aim to understand how actors respond to field logic plurality and maintain legitimacy through business model innovation. Drawing on a longitudinal field study in the fashion industry, we traced how de novo and incumbent firms incorporate circular logics in business models (for sustainability) and uncover how the intersection between issue and exchange fields creates institutional complexity and experimental spaces for business model innovation. Our findings showed a shift in the discourse on circular logic that diverted attention and resources from materials innovation (e.g., recycling) to business model innovation (e.g., circular business models). By juxtaposing institutional complexity and external pressure to maintain legitimacy, we derived four strategic business model innovation responses-preserve, detach, integrate and extend-that illuminate how actors leverage shifting logics and innovate extant business models (for sustainability). We make novel contributions to the literature on organizational fields, business models for sustainability, and business model innovation.

https://doi.org/10.1177/10860266221117250

The main objective of this special issue is to find ways to go beyond "circular utopia" and "circular paralysis" towards "strong sustainability" and "strong circularity." We invite scholars to investigate how organizations can transform towards the circular economy and what the impacts are of doing so. How do we go from the visionary umbrella concept of the circular economy to strategic organizational transformation that contributes to a successful sustainability transition that addresses challenging climate, resource, and societal issues?

https://doi.org/10.1177/10860266221148298