Business models serve as the depiction of a company’s way of creating, delivering and capturing value (Zott and Amit, 2010). Business models are acknowledged as powerful concepts and tools, since they link the strategic with... [ view full abstract ]
Business models serve as the depiction of a company’s way of creating, delivering and capturing value (Zott and Amit, 2010). Business models are acknowledged as powerful concepts and tools, since they link the strategic with the operational perspective of a firm (Sommer, 2012) and focus on the value proposition as the central mediating factor in mutually influencing a set of distinct elements. In this research, sustainable business models (SBMs) are defined as business models that succeed to capture economic, social, and ecological values for a firm’s customers and additional stakeholders, beyond its organizational boundaries (Schaltegger et al., 2016). However, the question of how to assess sustainability performance and impact of business models – in terms of multiple positive and negative impacts – is a topic that has not been sufficiently solved from a theoretical point of view yet (Lüdeke-Freund et al., 2017). This clarification would be needed though to offer decision makers appropriate information serving the purpose of contributing to sustainable development. Hence, this research at hand aims to contribute to the debate about performance and impact measurement of SBMs by reviewing existing sustainability assessment methods (e.g., Böhringer and Jochem, 2007; Singh et al., 2012; Lüdeke-Freund et al., 2017) and evaluating their suitability in the context of SBMs. This suitability can be assessed alongside various criteria, like focus area (product/service, company, system), consideration of the triple bottom line perspective (people, planet, profit), temporal characteristics (short term, long term, ex-post, ex-ante) or assessment rationale (qualitative, quantitative). It is the contextual application of such methods what we propose as a first step for assessing performance and impact of sustainable business models. However, many of those methods prioritize first order sustainability (“efficiency”) over second order sustainability (“systemic effectiveness”) (Baumgartner and Rauter, 2017), and a systematic approach for the impact assessment on the business model level is missing so far as well. Our research is a conceptual one based on a systematic literature review (Fink, 2005), whereby the conceptualization will mainly build on a quantitative and qualitative content analysis and might be supported by a further contingency analysis to detect association patterns, as well as to identify the strength of relationships between the elements identified in the review (Mayring and Gläser-Zikuda, 2008; Gold et al., 2010). The main contribution of this research is the provision of a systemic overview of existing sustainability assessment methods in the context of sustainable business models. While existing methods as such are considered to be suitable for assessing partial impacts of a sustainable business model, they can only serve as a basis for sustainability impact assessment on the business model level. Such an approach e.g., needs to go beyond existing system boundaries allowing also for a systemic, long-term assessment of impacts caused by the implementation of a sustainable business model; this is what we explore as a second step based on the evaluation of existing methods.
Keywords: business models; sustainable business models; sustainability assessment; impact assessment;
5a. Corporate sustainability and CSR
