Sustainable solutions have become crucial, but their disruptive nature remains a major barrier to their implementation. In this article, Caroline Gauthier, researcher from the Business Models Strategy team, and Bettina Gilomen, consultant in sustainability, propose to adopt a business model perspective to address this problem.
To do so they explore how actors of two French sustainable urban projects - Caserne de Bonne in Grenoble and IssyGrid® near Paris - have built or transformed their business model elements to enable energy-efficient solutions.
Contrarily to previous literature which explores how organizations can convert their supply chains and customer interfaces towards a sustainability focus, they consider other business model elements - such as value propositions and financial models - in exploring business model transitions.
Moreover, they highlight the necessity to implement and manage such sustainable projects collectively and call for enhancing the role of agency in facilitating the implementation and dispersal of sustainable solutions.
Finally, the authors propose a typology of business model transformations towards sustainable solutions.