Exploring Change toward Sustainability in Established Business Models

Sammanfattning: Sustainability outlines one of the greatest societal challenges of our time. To attain genuine sustainable development on a global level, firms must address unsustainability in their business models; that is, in what they offer to their markets, how they produce and deliver products and services, and how they collect and distribute value. Against this background, the purpose of this licentiate thesis is to explore how established business models change toward sustainability. To explore how established business models can change toward sustainability, it is relevant to review business models and how they handle sustainable change and innovation, but also how the surrounding actors — both business and non-business — affect the progress of change in business models.  This thesis contains two appended papers reflecting two perspectives that complement each other. The first paper explores how business model change toward sustainability occurs in an in-depth study of a globally established manufacturing firm, reviewing how they incorporated sustainable change orientations (SCO). The paper identifies varying dependencies on external systems and collaboration in different SCOs and describes interdependency among different SCOs.    The second paper reviews change toward sustainability from a broader perspective by exploring the roles of actors within a business ecosystem, reviewing change toward sustainability as role enactment and ecosystem interaction. The main theoretical contributions of the second paper are a mapping of generic ecosystem roles for sustainability, and a discussion of how these roles — independently and in interplay — affect and contribute to sustainable development of business ecosystems.   By combining insights from the two papers, a new organisational sustainable business model archetype is introduced, oriented to facilitate sustainability by creating favourable business ecosystem conditions. This sustainable business model archetype is proposed to replace parts of previous sustainable business model frameworks, increasing their consideration of business ecosystems. In addition, the licentiate offers examples of activities and practices an actor can perform to increase sustainability on an ecosystem level.   The licentiate benefits actors in pursuit of sustainability by exploring business model change toward sustainability, by emphasising the role of collaboration and the importance of participating in exchanges and interactions. The findings can help practitioners and scholars understand and apply business models and ecosystems more effectively to solve existing and emerging sustainability challenges.