From Refining Sugar to Growing Tomatoes

By Samuel W. Short, Nancy M. P. Bocken, C. Y. Barlow, Marian Chertow. 2014

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article seeks to advance the understanding of the relationship between industrial ecology (IE) and business model innovation for sustainability as a means and driver of new value creation and competitive advantage by expanding the understanding of industrial symbiosis (IS) and internal symbiosis. This is explored through the case study of British Sugar, which, at the time of writing, is the UK's largest sugar producer by market share. Over the past three decades, the company has systematically sought opportunities to turn waste streams and emissions from their core production processes into useful and positive inputs to new product lines. Their core business is still sugar, but the business model has evolved to offer a broad range of additional synergistic and profitable product lines, including animal feed, electricity, tomatoes, and bioethanol. The research explores the temporal dimension of dynamic business model innovation, framing it in the context of a continuous evolutionary process rather than a discrete design activity. The case will be of interest as an additional contribution to the growing literature on IS; in offering an approach for linking the themes of IE literature and sustainable business model innovation more concretely in research and practice; and, by presenting the case as an evolutionary innovation process, the article furthers the emerging literature on business model innovation for sustainability.

Subfields: Environmental Chemistry, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5f2063950b9dde754373b8fbd5a1b9cabfe93f38

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In Environmental Chemistry

In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Supply chain management and the circular economy: towards the circular supply chain (2018, unknown): “For example, British Sugar has increased its revenue streams and reduced costs via converting waste streams and even CO2 emissions from its core business of sugar production into inputs for other product lines such as tomatoes, bio-ethanol and animal feed (Short et al., 2014).”
Industrial Symbiosis Dynamics and the Problem of Equivalence: Proposal for a Comparative Framework (2017, background): “…of British Sugar, which evolved through boundary expansion to create trade for numerous by-products including excess energy and carbon dioxide, which helped the company become not only the largest sugar manufacturer in the country, but also the largest tomato grower as well (Short et al. 2014).”
Towards a Conceptual Framework of Sustainable Business Model Innovation in the Agri-Food Sector: A Systematic Literature Review (2017, unknown): “One of the more developed articles uses a business model framework when studying the relationship between business model innovation and industrial ecology [41].”