N.M.P. Bocken, S.W. Short, P. Rana, S. Evans
6 min
While many companies pursue incremental eco-efficiency or corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, these efforts are often insufficient to address the systemic challenges of global sustainability. The authors argue that true sustainability requires fundamental business model innovation—rethinking how a firm creates, delivers, and captures value. To address the fragmentation in current literature and practice, the authors conducted a systematic review to identify, analyze, and categorize mechanisms that contribute to sustainable business models (SBMs). By coding examples from both academic literature and industrial practice, they developed a set of eight 'sustainable business model archetypes.'
The study organizes these archetypes into three high-level groupings—technological, social, and organizational—to help firms identify transformation paths:
This framework serves as a practical tool for researchers and practitioners to de-risk the innovation process. Rather than viewing sustainability as an add-on, these archetypes encourage firms to integrate sustainability into the core logic of their business. The authors emphasize that while these archetypes can be applied individually, the most significant sustainability impacts are often achieved by combining multiple approaches. By providing a common vocabulary, the study aims to accelerate the development of sustainable business models and guide future research agendas.
Alex: That service-based model is the one that gets cited most often. What's the mechanism there—why does it change the incentive structure?
Sam: Because ownership of the asset stays with the firm. If you're selling performance rather than units, product longevity becomes a revenue driver rather than a threat to repeat sales. Planned obsolescence is no longer rational. The firm's economic interest and the sustainability outcome are now pointing in the same direction, which is structurally different from trying to impose sustainability constraints on a model built around volume.
Alex: That's a clean alignment. But does the paper suggest a firm can implement one archetype and call it done?
Sam: No—and this is where the framework's practical limitation becomes important. Sustainability benefits are rarely achieved in isolation. A service-based model without attention to material efficiency might just shift where the environmental cost lands. The archetypes are designed to be combined, and the paper is explicit that the real work is in orchestrating several of them simultaneously within a firm's specific value network.
Alex: So the taxonomy gives you the vocabulary, but not the orchestration logic. [[RP_SECTION:framework-limitations|Framework Limitations]]
Sam: That's a fair characterization. The authors frame it as a common language to bridge theory and practice—something that lets researchers and practitioners talk across silos. But the framework doesn't prescribe which combinations work under which conditions. That's left as an open research question, and honestly it's the most significant gap. A practitioner looking for guidance on sequencing or interaction effects won't find it here.
Alex: There's also the question of what the framework measures. You mentioned it's grounded in industrial practice—does that mean it reflects the metrics firms actually track?
Sam: That's where another limitation surfaces. The taxonomy skews toward environmental metrics. Social sustainability—labor conditions, community impact, distributional effects—is under-represented, largely because it's under-represented in the literature base the authors were coding from. So the framework inherits that bias. It's not a flaw in the methodology so much as a reflection of where the field was in 2014.
Alex: Which raises the question of whether it needs updating. [[RP_SECTION:future-research-directions|Future Research Directions]]
Sam: The authors anticipated that. They frame it explicitly as a living research agenda, not a finished product. The next logical step they point to is moving from static categorization toward tools that can model the sustainability return on investment of different archetype combinations before a firm commits to a major operational shift. That would be a meaningful advance—turning a descriptive taxonomy into something with predictive utility.
Alex: So the contribution here is really about providing the conceptual infrastructure that makes that next step possible.
Sam: That's the right framing. By giving the field a shared vocabulary and a structured map of the design space, the paper enables more precise research questions and more rigorous comparisons across cases. The shift it's advocating—from defensive, compliance-driven adjustment to proactive systemic redesign—requires that kind of shared conceptual foundation first. Whether the field has built sufficiently on it in the decade since is a separate question worth asking.
Alex: A useful provocation for anyone working at the intersection of strategy and sustainability. Thanks for the close read, Sam.
Sam: Thanks for listening to ResearchPod.