Over the last couple of years, the concept of business models has become well known in the discussion about corporate sustainable practices. A business model as a representation of how a company creates and delivers value (Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010) states also whether sustainable practices are considered or not. Consequently, the discussion leads into the direction of new, innovative sustainable business models for which one criteria is central: sustainable value creation (Porter & Kramer, 2006; Jonker, 2016, Schaltegger et al., 2012). Hence, a business model is a conceptual tool that describes how an organization produces, delivers, and captures value and that helps understand how a company does business (Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010). This field of research raised concepts as “new business models”, sustainable business models” “business models for sustainability”, and “business models innovation” among others. Because it is an emerging topic there is no consolidation of the concepts and terms used. In addition, the literature review indicates the need to identify the different aspects, trends and gaps in research. This paper aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the topic of new business models by doing a systematic literature review on it. The focus is on describing the state of the art and the future directions of studies on new business models, stressing the links with sustainability and innovation. In order to do this, we deployed both bibliometric methods and content analysis to deepen and provide an overview of the knowledge structure of the sustainable innovation research. The ISIWeb of Science was defined as data source due to its reputation of being one of the most important bibliographic databases. In order to set the research domain, we searched for scientific articles using the term “Business Model*” AND “Innovat*” AND “Sustainab*”. The initial search reveals a total of 682 documents, from which we selected according to some conditions: (i) only articles; and (ii) only written in English. These criteria lead to a corpus of 366 scientific articles, which were submitted to clustering and mapping techniques through Bibexcel and VosViewer (version 1.5.4) software. The co-occurrence frequency of terms was used to build a map based on network data, in order to identify and disclose the structural and dynamic aspects of the scientific research area. Finally, we created a bibliometric map to show, in a visual way, strong associations and divisions between the several fields of the sustainable innovations stream of research. Based on the most significant keywords (the higher frequency keywords), the map revealed 4 different clusters: value proposition, value constellation, social profit equation and economic profit equation. These dimensions are aligned with Yunus et al (2010) proposition and revealed that “value proposition” has been the most significant area linking sustainable business models to sustainable innovation. This article contributes, from a theoretical point of view, in several important aspects from which we highlight: i) the finding that “innovation” is significantly closer to business models than sustainability issues; and ii) the identification of a deep gap of theoretical and practical studies correlating sustainable business models and sustainable innovation.
Keywords: New business models; Sustainable business models; Business models for sustainability; Business models innovation; Systematic literature review.
5a. Corporate sustainability and CSR
