Given the Sustainable Development Goal agenda defined by United Nations in 2015, there is a new trend to create new business models looking for the social, environmental and economic equilibrium. Business models are “concerned with how the firm defines its competitive strategy, through the design of the product or service it offers to its market, how it charges for it, what it costs to produce, how it differentiates itself from other firms by the value proposition, and how the firm integrates its own value chain with those of other firm’s in a value network” (Rasmussen, 2007). On the other hand, Sustainable Business Models (SBM) “incorporate the triple bottom line approach and change of stakeholders interests including environment and society” (Bocken et al, 2013). They are important to incorporate and evaluate sustainable innovation and development within business, and used to understand the way in which firms incorporate sustainable innovations, considering dynamics within the internal firm and with the environment surrounding the firm.
Bocken et al.2014, define nine types of SBM archetypes. Those models were obtained from the observation and classification of different business models observed in practice. Those archetypes can determine different strategies that organizations can use in order to improve their sustainability. However, for a certain firm or industry, it still difficult to evaluate which of those archetypes fits better with the current company situation in order to become more sustainable.
Sustainable development concepts and applications have been receiving growing attention in management literature and practice during the last 20 years (Hahn, T., Figge, F., Pinkse, J. and Preuss, L.; 2010). Currently there still several challenges in terms of finding scenarios and conditions in which economic, social and environmental fields are in harmony. For a given ecosystem (e.g. company, industry, geography) is it possible to find which are the common areas where they can coexist? Or at least is it possible to better understand how trade - offs are present?.
This paper contributes both to literature and to practice by introducing a new conceptual framework to model ecosystems and analyze how the trade-offs between social, economic and environmental wellbeing are present and if there are viable conditions in which the three of them can be in equilibrium. The model states that there are different rates that shape the environmental, economic and social dynamics: [1] The rate of natural processes defined as the rate at which biological systems can recover from disturbances, such as natural disasters or anthropogenic resource extraction; [2[ the rate of corporate processes defined as the minimum rate at which goods and services are produced to guarantee financial viability, and [3] the rate of social processes defined as the need of societies to growing and develop, with the satisfaction of the needs of society.
This conceptual framework is tested with a simulation model where some of the archetypes introduced by Bocken et al. 2014, are used to evaluate the different tradeoffs between the economic, social and environmental areas and how they reconcile with the concept of sustainable development.
