Stakeholders interdependencies and their role in sustainable business model innovation

TL;DR

This paper explores how stakeholder inter-dependencies influence sustainable business model innovation, emphasizing the importance of understanding goal, task, resource, and soft-goal dependencies for effective sustainability transitions.

Contribution

It introduces an actor dependency model to analyze stakeholder inter-dependencies and applies the ecology of business model experimentation map as a practical tool.

Findings

Stakeholder inter-dependencies significantly impact sustainable business model development.

The actor dependency model clarifies the nature of goal, task, resource, and soft-goal dependencies.

Using the ecology of business model experimentation map enhances understanding of multi-actor sustainability efforts.

Abstract

Sustainable innovation requires in-time development, diversification and transformation of business models from one to another. Business model innovation, development and transformation for sustainability incorporates economic, environmental and social value by advancing the management of the stakeholders into the business model. Except a little research on business model inter-dependencies, scant research has been done on stakeholders inter-dependencies in order to understand their nature and relationship while developing or transforming a business model and creating an impact on environment, society and economy. Therefore, current research uses actor dependency model to analyze four different kind of inter-dependencies, namely, goal-dependency, task-dependency, resource-dependency and soft-goal dependency. The ecology of business model experimentation map is used as a tool for practical understanding of sustainable business modelling with a multi-actor approach in a workshop setting. The findings will help to understand how stakeholders depend on each other while developing a business model for sustainability and innovation.