مدل کسب و کار پایدار به عنوان سیستم های مرزگستری از انتقال ارزش Sustainable business models as boundary-spanning systems of value transfers

1. Introduction Sustainable development is one of the key challenges of the twenty-first century. As the core source of value creation in society, a prominent part of achieving higher levels of sustainability should be accomplished by organizations (e.g., Nidumolu et al., 2009; Porter and Van der Linde, 1995). Still, hardly any organization is sustainable in each and every aspect of its operations, nor is there just one way of incorporating sustainability into an organization. For one, there are different kinds of sustainability to be achieved. Besides financial sustainability (i.e., ‘profit’) of the organization, social sustainability (i.e., ‘people’) and environmental/ecological sustainability (i.e., ‘planet’) should also be taken into account, as postulated in the triple bottom line of sustainability (Elkington, 1997). Moreover, in order to achieve environmental and/or social sustainability, we not only need more environmentally friendly product innovations (De Medeiros et al., 2014), but also more transparent (O’Rourke, 2014) and sustainable supply chains (Linton et al., 2007), as well as new business models (Boons and LüdekeFreund, 2013; Lewandowski, 2016). In this study, we focus on the latter, since sustainability efforts in many cases cannot be realized with a product-focused approach alone, but often need an additional boost in the form of business model innovation (Bocken et al., 2016; Huijben et al., 2016; Lovins et al., 1999). We therefore explore how sustainability is reflected in the business models (henceforth ‘BM’) of organizations by answering the question: “How is environmental and social sustainability manifested in the content, structure, and governance of business models of sustainable organizations?”