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.

Sustainable Business Models: A Review

Departing from previous studies, which have mostly focused on Western countries, our work investigates the determinants of the corporate environment, social and governance (ESG) reporting among Asian firms. Examining Asian public listed firms from 2005 to 2017, our cross-sectional model results indicate that firm characteristics (economic performance, profitability, leverage and size) are found to disclose additional ESG information. The outcome is consistent with the legitimacy theory, which posits that firms provide higher ESG reporting to legitimize and justify the firm’s continuous existence. The findings are important for firms, stakeholders and policymakers. While firms may formulate ways to improve ESG reporting to compete in the international market, the stakeholders may pressure firms to disclose more information on ESG and policymakers to designalegal framework on ESG that suits firms in Asia.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/239583/1/1759806471.pdf

Determinants of Corporate Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) Reporting among Asian Firms

This research was funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, project number: PID2019-105497GB-100.

Building a Theoretical Framework for Corporate Sustainability

Organizations are under mounting pressure to adapt to and to adopt corporate sustainability (CS) practices. Notwithstanding the increasing research attention given to the subject and the meaningful theoretical contributions, it is claimed that a definition, and a commonly accepted understanding of the concept of corporate sustainability, is still missing. Alignment on the meaning of CS is of critical importance for enabling coherent and effective practices. The lack of a sound theoretical foundation and of conceptual clarity of corporate sustainability has been identified as an important cause of unsatisfactory and fruitless actions by organizations. To address the questions “What is Corporate Sustainability?” and “Is it true there is a lack of convergence and clarity of the concept?”, we perform an ontological analysis of the different and interrelated concepts, and a necessary condition analysis on the key constitutive features of corporate sustainability within the academic literature. We demonstrate that the concept of corporate sustainability is clearer than most authors claim and can be well defined around its environmental, social and economic constitutive pillars with the purpose to provide equal opportunities to future generations.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/13/7838/pdf?version=1656401783

Clarifying the Concept of Corporate Sustainability and Providing Convergence for Its Definition

Harmful exposure to erythemally-effective ultraviolet radiation (UVR) poses high health risks such as malignant keratinocyte cancers and eye-related diseases. Delivering short-term forecasts of the solar ultraviolet index (UVI) is an effective way to advise UVR exposure information to the public at risk. This research reports on a novel framework built to forecast UVI, integrating antecedent lagged memory of cloud statistical properties and the solar zenith angle (SZA). To produce the forecasts at multi-step horizon we design a 3-phase hybrid convolutional long short-term memory network (W-O-convLSTM) model, validated with Queensland-based datasets in near real-time ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i.e</i> ., 10-minute, 20-minute, 30-minute and 1 hour forecast horizon). Our approach in optimizing the performance also entails a robust selective filtering method using the BorutaShap algorithm, data decomposition with stationary wavelet transformation and hyperparameter optimization using the Optuna algorithm. We assess the performance of the proposed W-O-convLSTM model alongside the baseline and benchmark models. The captured results, through statistical metrics and visual infographics, elucidate the superior performance of the objective model in short-term UVI forecasting. For instance, at a 10-minute forecast horizon, our objective model yields a relatively high correlation coefficient of ~0.961 in the autumn, 0.909 in the summer, 0.926 in the spring and 0.936 in the winter season. Overall, the proposed O-convLSTM model outperforms its competing counterpart models for all forecast horizons with the lowest absolute forecast error. The robustness of our newly proposed model avers its practical utility in delivering sun-protection behavior recommendations that can mitigate UV-exposure-related public health risk. We also recommend that future integration of aerosol and ozone effects with cloud cover data can enhance our forecasting framework for wider applications in solar energy or skin health monitoring systems. 

Cloud Affected Solar UV Prediction With Three-Phase Wavelet Hybrid Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory Network Multi-Step Forecast System

This study provides an XGBoost model to characterize the environmental orientation of innovative firms. This novel approach, using state-of-the-art machine learning methodologies and multiple recognized drivers of eco-innovation, provides solid empirical support for the understanding of the mechanisms that are crucial for firms' transition to a low-carbon economy. Although many drivers have been considered to affect firms’ eco-innovation, our feature selection process using the BorutaShap algorithm demonstrates that few aspects are truly relevant. Furthermore, analyzing a tree surrogate of the final model, our study explores the different paths or combinations of aspects that consistently lead to a specific eco-innovation orientation. The accuracy of the model and the large and complete spectrum of innovative companies in the sample contribute to the generalizability of the results. This study is particularly relevant because the main drivers of firms’ eco-innovative orientation depend on their innovative behavior, indicating that the managerial and policy work has to be directed to raising awareness of the different externalities derived from innovation. On one side, policy regulations should continue to pressure firms with environmental standards. On the other side, managers can stimulate the creation of a corporate innovative culture oriented toward improving operational efficiency (reducing unnecessary costs), improving the workplace environment, and focusing on new customer demands, which, in essence, will guide the organization to be more environmentally and socially responsible.

Exposing the ideal combination of endogenous–exogenous drivers for companies’ ecoinnovative orientation: Results from machine-learning methods

This chapter aims to compare the most common sustainable business models with the methodologies that have been designed in order for companies to embrace sustainability. The methodology deployed has been based on a state of art of the scientific literature about environmental methodologies and the analysis of successful sustainable business models. The results show that those methodologies are useful for improving specific areas or business units from organizations, but they don’t offer a holistic point of view for embedding sustainability among the business model. Currently, companies are concerned about environment and are trying to offer a value proposition based on sustainability. However, only a few companies are able to become sustainable in a successful way.

Reshaping Business Models with an Environmental Perspective

This paper is encompassed in the process of the development of a theory about sustainability. Our aim is to present a case study protocol for performing multiple-case studies about corporate sustainability. It has been designed according to the methodology about case study research. It includes a combination of frameworks that will help researchers to draw and understand how sustainability is integrated through the value chain of the company, and it also has a set of questions that will help to know the environmental practices that the target company deploys from a strategic point of view to the most common operations. Finally, once all the information has been retrieved, it will be possible to identify the way that value generated by sustainability practices flows through the company’s activities and the way customers perceive it.

Joaquín Sánchez-Planelles

Papers

Building a Theoretical Framework for Corporate Sustainability

Exposing the ideal combination of endogenous–exogenous drivers for companies’ ecoinnovative orientation: Results from machine-learning methods

Reshaping Business Models with an Environmental Perspective

Case Study Protocol for the Analysis of Sustainable Business Models