Innovating business models for sustainability: An essential practice for responsible managers

Business model innovation for sustainability offers responsible managers a practice that enables the (re-)consideration of how they care for and deliver value to stakeholder constituents, and create solutions to key sustainability challenges such as climate change, biodiversity and poverty. In this chapter we seek to provide an overview of key themes within the field of business model innovation for sustainability in relation to responsible management. In particular, we give consideration to conceptualisations of business models for sustainability, identification of patterns of business model components, understanding the innovation process, unpacking the innovation challenges, and providing tools and frameworks. Based on this overview we offer three opportunities for responsible management research to further help responsible managers to innovate business models for sustainability: (1) developing context sensitivity to connect business models to the needs of socio-ecological systems; (2) enhancing approaches to experimentation through new tools and frameworks, and; (3) investigating new ways of innovating business models for sustainability through changing components of value proposition, creation and capture.