Sustainable business model innovation and scaling through collaboration

Abstract

Over the past decade, scholars and practitioners have increasingly paid attention to sustainable business models (SBM). How to upscale SBMs is a key question in transition research, but current research has rarely adopted a firm-level perspective to discuss the scaling strategies that initiators of SBMs can use. Collaboration with other actors is one of these scaling strategies, but its adoption by firms hinges on different factors. Considering the type of initiator of the SBM (newcomer vs. incumbent firm) and the differentiation of the SBM's value proposition (high or low), we propose a framework which distinguishes four ‘scaling-through-collaboration’ strategies that firms can use. We explain each strategy with illustrative examples and discuss the array of potential partners and the incentives to pursue collaboration with them. Our work shows how firms can contribute to sustainability transitions by leveraging collaboration to scale their SBM.