Sustainable Business Model Design: A review of tools for developing Responsible Business Models

Sustainable and Responsible Business has become a mainstream concept as organisations seek to adapt to a changing business environment and address social, environmental and economic challenges. However many academics and practitioners suggest that such efforts are prone to inevitable failure as they are peripheral, uneconomic, and incremental. It is common for businesses to innovate at the level of their products and services yet to be truly sustainable and responsible, activities should be linked with the core business of the firm and requires more radical innovation. There is then a need to that innovate at the level of a firm's value creation process, at the level of the business model. Whilst there is much research which present case studies of companies who utilise sustainable business model designs, only recently has attention turned to the development and application of tools and techniques which can assist business leaders in developing models to apply to their own organisations. This chapter discusses sustainable business model design before reviewing a range of toolkits designed to integrate sustainability principles into business strategic planning and assessing their applicability to sustainable and responsible business model design. The aim is to identify and review some of the key tools available for firms to utilise when developing new sustainable business model pathways.