2018/01/01 by Irina Tiemann, Henning Breuer, Klaus Fichter +1 · 1 citation
Decision Sciences · Engineering · Business, Management and Accounting · #Complex Systems and Decision Making #Sustainable Industrial Ecology #Service and Product Innovation
paper · doi:10.1504/ijev.2018.10013801
openalex publication_date 2018/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/19
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.