Research groups

The concept of Sustainable Business Models is extremely effective and very common among professionals, but among scholars, there is no consensus on how business models can evolve towards higher levels of sustainability. The business model can be defined as the system of boundary-spanning interactions of the organization that are essential for incoming flows. Under selective pressures due to economic, ecological, technological, relational and institutional phenomena, business models evolve dynamically through micro-adaptations and / or radical changes. The evolution towards circular economy models is a good example of these processes. Which factors help companies to become or remain competitive and to adapt their system (adaptive management) of interactions to emerging sustainable transformations? A new theoretical approach based on the innovation of the sustainable business model is provided by the literature on common goods (commons) and adaptive co-management. The concept of common goods can be used to identify all those systems that provide community resources for collective use, which are vulnerable to the opportunistic (over-exploitation and / or disengaging) behavior of that community of users. Examples include the public spaces of a city, the reputation of the industrial district and the biodiversity of the natural area.