Sustainable Business Models: A Review

EasyChair Preprint no. 2324

Abstract

During the past two decades of e-commerce growth, the concept of a business model has become increasingly popular. More recently, the research on this realm has grown rapidly, with diverse research activities covering a wide range of application areas. Considering sustainable development goals, innovative business models have brought a competitive advantage to improve the sustainability performance of organizations. The concept of the sustainable business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value, in economic, social, cultural, or other contexts, in a sustainable way. The process of sustainable business model construction forms an innovative part of a business strategy. Different industries and businesses have utilized sustainable business models’ concept to satisfy their economic, environmental, and social goals simultaneously. However, the success, popularity, and progress of sustainable business models in different application domains are not clear. To explore this issue, this research provides a comprehensive review of sustainable business models literature in various application areas. Notable sustainable business models are identified and further classified in fourteen unique categories, and in every category, the progress -either failure or success- has been reviewed, and the research gaps are discussed. Taxonomy of the applications includes innovation, management and marketing, entrepreneurship, energy, fashion, healthcare, agri-food, supply chain management, circular economy, developing countries, engineering, construction and real estate, mobility and transportation, and hospitality. The key contribution of this study is that it provides an insight into the state of the art of sustainable business models in various application areas and future research directions.

Keyphrases: business model, circular economy, climate change, Sustainability, Sustainable business model, sustainable development, sustainable mobility

@Booklet{EasyChair:2324,
  author = {Saeed Nosratabadi and Amir Mosavi and Shahaboddin Shamshirband and Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas and Andry Rakotonirainy and Kwok-Wing Chau},
  title = {Sustainable Business Models: A Review},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 2324},

  year = {EasyChair, 2020}}