Over the last decade, research on sustainable businesses (SBs) and sustainable innovations has increased rapidly, as sustainability has become a new premise for doing business (Dryzek 2005; Birkin et al. 2009a, b). However, applying business model innovation (BMI) as a way to create sustainable value requires several alterations of our ways of understanding and evaluating businesses and their business models (BMs). Yet, in exploring the theoretical concepts of sustainable business models (SBMs), the starting point would have to be the original definitions of BMs.

BMs and BMI have been the focus of substantial attention from both academics and practitioners (e.g., Amit and Zott 2001; Chesbrough and Rosenbloom 2002; Christensen and Raynor 2003; Govindarajan and Trimble 2005; Markides 2008; Teece 2010; Ritter and Andersen 2014; Foss and Saebi 2017) and have been the subject of a still growing number of academic and practitioner-oriented studies. The extensive stream of work on BMI has generated many important insights. However, our understanding of BMs remains fragmented, as stressed by Zott et al. (2011). One thing the authors in this field seem to agree on is that a BM is a model of the way in which a business does business (Taran 2011). However, while there is consensus on the meaning of “doing business,” namely creating and delivering value so as to generate value and achieve a SB position, there is less agreement on the “model” part (Taran et al. 2013). Another key challenge of performing studies in BM and BMI relates to the issue addressed by David J. Teece, who states that “the concept of a business model lacks theoretical grounding in economics or in business studies” (Teece 2010, p. 174).

BMs appear in many different forms. They can be applied as a core unit of analysis extending beyond the business boundaries (e.g., Zott and Amit 2007). In addition, BMs may be viewed as a construct between strategy and implementation (Baden-Fuller and Morgan 2010). BMs can also be a means for commercializing new technologies (Chesbrough and Rosenbloom 2002; Chesbrough 2007, 2010) and as an intermediary between different innovation actors such as businesses, financiers, and research institutions, that is, actors who shape innovation networks (Doganova and Eyquem-Renault 2009). BMs can therefore be subject to innovation themselves or be a template for implementing managerial initiatives (Zott and Amit 2010). Furthermore, they can be used to depict current realities (“as is”) or used for simulations to decide on a preferred future (“to be”) (Osterwalder 2004; Chatterjee 2013), that is, as role exemplars (Baden-Fuller and Morgan 2010). Existing BMs can then be seen as a representation of strategic decisions, which have been implemented through tactical choices (Casadesus-Masanell and Ricart 2010), which may create self-enforcing “virtuous circles” in processes and resources, as stressed by Casadesus-Masanell and Ricart (2011).

BMs can also have a narrative role (Magretta 2002), serving as boundary objects (Doganova and Eyquem-Renault 2009) and as conventions (Verstraete and Jouison-Lafitte 2011) or theories of performative actions (Perkmann and Spicer 2010) in which stakeholders become motivated to participate in the joint realization of a venture. As such, the core idea of the BM concept addresses many classic questions of strategic nature, such as market relevance (value proposition), what customers to serve and how to serve them, how to make a profit, and what technology to use (Magretta 2002; Sandberg 2002; Morris et al. 2005; Verstraete and Jouison-Lafitte 2011). Thus, in defining BMI we apply the following definition by Casadesus-Masanell and Zhu (2013, p. 464): “The search for new business logics of the firm and new ways to create and capture value for its stakeholders.”

Baden-Fuller and Morgan (2010) underline that from a holistic and systemic concept, a BM perspective may be expected to contribute to a sustainable business model innovation (SBMI) agenda by opening up new approaches to overcoming internal and external barriers. Although there is a growing body of literature analyzing and discussing sustainability and sustainable development on the political and society levels (Dryzek 2005), the operationalization of the concept in relation to business and on the corporate level is still rather weak (Bansal 2005; Stubbs and Cocklin 2008; Zink et al. 2008; Carroll and Shabana 2010).

Furthermore, studying the concept of sustainability is challenged by the fact that it is a fragmented concept, and some researchers even question whether sustainability is a concept or a political discourse (Dryzek 2005) or an artifact (Faber et al. 2005). In the so-called Brundtland report, “Our Common Future” by World Commission on Environment and Development, sustainable development is defined as follows: “Sustainable development is the kind of development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” One attempt of how to transfer the general and rather vague Brundtland definition of sustainability into corporate level is presented by Dyllick and Hockerts (2002, p. 131), who define sustainable development as “meeting the needs of a firm’s direct and indirect stakeholders without compromising its ability to meet the needs of future stakeholders as well.” This explicit focus on stakeholder needs emphasizes the importance of businesses responding to their ecosystem and the primary stakeholders such as shareholders, employees, and customers, but also secondary stakeholders such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in order to gain and maintain legitimacy and license to operate with regard to various sustainable issues (Zink et al. 2008; Lodsgård and Aagaard 2016).

The application of a long-term perspective to the needs of future stakeholders underlines the complexity of long-term management practices and SBMs combined with short-term requests from shareholders for increased profits, which is a key challenge that needs to be addressed at the corporate level (Poncelet 2001). The most common translation of sustainability into business on corporate level is the triple bottom line, which consists of three sustainable dimensions: people, planet, and profit (Elkington 1997) and is described as three equally important managerial principles of SBMs (Hansen et al. 2009; Bradbury-Huang 2010; Schaltegger and Wagner 2011). As this approach is both well established and applied in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)-reporting of many international companies reporting to global reporting initiative (GRI), the same methodology will be applied in the frame designed to evaluate the level of sustainability of BMs and their value creation. The three evaluation criteria or dimensions are also referred to as people, planet, and profit and are explained as follows:

With a focus on integrating sustainability into business systems, Charter and Clark (2007, p. 9) offer a definition of sustainable innovation embracing all of these three elements:...