Sustainable Business Models: A Review

TL;DR

This paper reviews the development and application of sustainable business models across various industries, highlighting their success, challenges, and future research directions in integrating sustainability with business strategies.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive classification and analysis of sustainable business models in diverse application areas, identifying research gaps and future directions.

Findings

Increased adoption of sustainable models with technological advancements.

Success and failure cases across different industries are documented.

Future research should focus on technological integration and industry-specific challenges.

Abstract

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 the various application areas and future research directions. This paper concludes that popularity and the success rate of sustainable business models in all application domains have been increased along with the increasing use of advanced technologies.