Cooperating for sustainable businessmodels

This proposal focuses on why organizations engage in Sustainable Business Models in relation to how they can create social and economic value in cases of eco-system services and circularity. A sustainable business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers and captures both economic and societal value. Combining economic and societal value is not trivial since societal value cannot always be measured in economic terms and therefore is hard to incorporate in business structures that are dominated by economic short-term rationales. The starting point of this proposal is that the development of sustainable business models is always a collective effort. We focus on the socio-institutional environment in which a firm operates as we assume that this is an important explanatory variable in the adoption decision of firms for sustainable business models. We use the innovation system framework to map this environment and analyze what parts of the innovation system influence firms most and what configurations lead to a higher rate of SBM adoption. The second leg of this proposal highlights the cooperative nature in the deployment of most sustainable business models. The capabilities of firms to successfully participate in cooperative projects with a multitude of stakeholders is another important variable that may explain the decision to engage in sustainable business models. We focus on analyzing specific cases of sustainable business models in the Dutch province of Zeeland and compare these with project in other regions in order to vary the most important variables.