Sustainable Business Models: A Review

By Saeed Nosratabadi, Amir Mosavi, Shahaboddin Shamshirband, Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas, Andry Rakotonirainy, Kwok-Wing Chau. Social Science Research Network, 2019

539 citations recorded by the source corpus.

During the past two decades of e-commerce growth, the concept of a business model has become increasingly popular. More recently, the research on this realm has grown rapidly, with diverse research activity covering a wide range of application areas. Considering the sustainable development goals, the innovative business models have brought a competitive advantage to improve the sustainability performance of organizations. The concept of the sustainable business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value, in economic, social, cultural, or other contexts, in a sustainable way. The process of sustainable business model construction forms an innovative part of a business strategy. Different industries and businesses have utilized sustainable business models’ concept to satisfy their economic, environmental, and social goals simultaneously. However, the success, popularity, and progress of sustainable business models in different application domains are not clear. To explore this issue, this research provides a comprehensive review of sustainable business models literature in various application areas. Notable sustainable business models are identified and further classified in fourteen unique categories, and in every category, the progress -either failure or success- has been reviewed, and the research gaps are discussed. Taxonomy of the applications includes innovation, management and marketing, entrepreneurship, energy, fashion, healthcare, agri-food, supply chain management, circular economy, developing countries, engineering, construction and real estate, mobility and transportation, and hospitality. The key contribution of this study is that it provides an insight into the state of the art of sustainable business models in various application areas and future research directions. This paper concludes that popularity and the success rate of sustainable business models in all application domains have been increased along with the increasing use of advanced technologies.

Subfields: Business and International Management, Marketing, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a8a2e5db4f5276ac0d475636dffda690b7d4ddd9

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Citations in the corpus

Flood Prediction Using Machine Learning Models: Literature Review (2018, methodology): “Nevertheless, the model could be further optimized for better performance using optimization methods introduced in references [221–225].”
Circular Economy Models in Agro-Food Systems: A Review (2021, background): “[53] discussed sustainable business models in different sectors, considering the process of building a sustainable business model as an innovative part of a business strategy, to provide beneficial solutions to all stakeholders and meet the requirements of the environment and society.”
State of the Art of Machine Learning Models in Energy Systems, a Systematic Review (2019, methodology): “(2016) [62] performed a sensitivity analysis using catalyzed-transesterification as a renewable energy production system [63] by an ANFIS-based methodology.”
A Framework for Evaluating and Disclosing the ESG Related Impacts of AI with the SDGs (2021, background): “Research on sustainable business models, for example, is most often related to sustainability in general [12,13,30], while some do connect it specifically to the SDGs [3].”