Sustainable Business Models & Circular Ecosystems

For society to thrive within the limits of our planet, business models should prevent environmental degradation and human exploitation. We investigate how businesses make the difficult transition towards sustainable business models and circular ecosystems.

What we offer

What value does business bring to society and who should benefit from their activities? To develop a sustainable business model, core aspects of the business might need to be reconsidered: successful strategies, long-standing partnerships, organisational structures, profitable activities, and routinized practices. These considerations requires companies to collect and report data on current social, environmental, and economic performance, for development of possible future scenarios. Strategically, such sustainable business models are not developed in isolation but through co-creation. By viewing their environment as an ecosystem, businesses can foster collaboration instead of competition and adopt circular resource systems. We investigate how these changes can be initiated, how resistance to change can be overcome, how benefits can be maintained in the long term, and how risks can be mitigated.

The requirement that businesses report on their sustainability impact often leads to an overhaul of their business model as well.

The BMO group brings a unique lens to existing theories on resource dependencies, institutional pressures, and stakeholder approaches, and contributes to the creation of new theories on inclusive business management and organisational change. These insights are translated into strategies for business managers to facilitate sustainability transitions.

Key Publications

Cholez, C., Pauly, O., Mahdad, M., Mehrabi, S., Giagnocavo, C., & Bijman, J. (2023). Heterogeneity of inter-organizational collaborations in agrifood chain sustainability-oriented innovations. Agricultural Systems 212: 103774. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2023.103774

Garst, J., Blok, V., Branzei, O., Jansen, L., & Omta, O. S. W. F. (2021). Toward a Value-Sensitive Absorptive Capacity Framework: Navigating Intervalue and Intravalue Conflicts to Answer the Societal Call for Health. Business & Society 60(6): 1349–1386. https://doi.org/10.1177/0007650319876108

Garst, J., Maas, K., & Suijs, J. (2022). Materiality Assessment Is an Art, Not a Science: Selecting ESG Topics for Sustainability Reports. California Management Review, 65(1), 64–90. https://doi.org/10.1177/00081256221120692

Salimi, N. (2023). Opportunity Recognition for Entrepreneurs Based on a Business Model for Sustainability: A Systematic Approach and Its Application in the Dutch Dairy Farming Sector, in IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 70(11): 3728-3744, https://doi.org/10.1109/TEM.2021.3082872

Benitez‐Altuna, F.; Materia, V.C.; Bijman, J.; Gaitán‐Cremaschi, D.; Trienekens, J. (2024). Farmer–buyer relationships and sustainable agricultural practices in the food supply chain: The case of vegetables in Chile, Agribusiness 40(1): 3-30. https://doi.org/10.1002/agr.21829

Fischer, A.; W. Dolfsma; & S. Pascucci (2022). Designing a Circular Contract Template: Insights from the Fairphone-as-a-Service project.​​​Journal of Cleaner Production 364: 132487.