Zoekresultaten

Business models of collaborative urban upcycling initiatives

Within European cities, entrepreneurs engage in private and public collaborative initiatives that work towards reducing local solid waste streams (Futurium, 2019). Furniture and interior design products account for nearly 50% of these waste streams, making them a key priority on the EU agenda to prevent climate change (Vanacore et al, 2021). New legislation to extend producer responsibility and reduce waste incineration is developing on a national level (PBL, 2021) and collaborative initiatives for urban upcycling are emerging (Ministerie I&W, 2023; Futurium, 2019). Business models to support upcycling are evolving, but their configuration and effectiveness is little understood. 

Agent-based modelling and simulation for circular business model experimentation

The viability of novel network-level circular business models (CBMs) is debated heavily. Many companies are hesitant to implement CBMs in their daily practice, because of the various roles, stakes and opinions and the resulting uncertainties. Testing novel CBMs prior to implementation is needed. Some scholars have used digital simulation models to test elements of business models, but this this has not yet been done systematically for CBMs. To address this knowledge gap, this paper presents a systematic iterative method to explore and improve CBMs prior to actual implementation by means of agent-based modelling and simulation. An agent-based model (ABM) was co-created with case study participants in three Industrial Symbiosis networks. The ABM was used to simulate and explore the viability effects of two CBMs in different scenarios. The simulation results show which CBM in combination with which scenario led to the highest network survival rate and highest value captured. In addition, we were able to explore the influence of design options and establish a design that is correlated to the highest CBM viability. Based on these findings, concrete proposals were made to further improve the CBM design, from company level to network level. This study thus contributes to the development of systematic CBM experimentation methods. The novel approach provided in this work shows that agent-based modelling and simulation is a powerful method to study and improve circular business models prior to implementation.

Shaping sustainable business models

Recent economic crises, environmental problems and social challenges have urged us to drastically change our consumption and production patterns and transform organisations to contribute to socio-technical transitions that positively impact these challenges. Therefore, sustainable development and the transition towards a circular economy are gaining increased attention from academics and are being widely adopted by national and local governments, companies and other organisations and institutions. Since the implementation of more sustainable solutions lags behind expectations and technological possibilities, scholars and practitioners are increasingly seeing sustainable business model innovation as the key pathway to show the value potential of new sustainable technology and stress the importance of integrating the interests of multiple stakeholders and their economic, environmental and social value goals in the business model’s development. However, there is limited research that elucidates which stakeholders are actively involved, how they interact and what the effect is on the collaborative business modelling process for sustainability. This thesis addresses this research gap by building on the notion of business models as boundary-spanning activity-systems and studies stakeholder interaction from the level of a focal firm, as well as from the level of cross-sector actors collaborating in innovation ecosystems. Through four independent studies, three empirical studies and a design science study, this thesis aims to provide a better understanding of how stakeholder interaction affects collaborative business modelling for sustainability.The first study (Chapter 2) took a process perspective on interaction with network ties from the perspective of a focal firm. Based on two case studies of SMEs successfully introducing sustainable technology in the market, value shaping was identified as the operative mechanism describing the relation between networking and business modelling, from ideation to growth of the business. A stage model with five successive forms of value shaping describes how, in each stage, interaction with network ties help firms to clarify the types of economic, environmental and social value that a sustainable technology can deliver and who possible beneficiaries are. In return, changes in the business model clarify what other network ties are needed, demonstrating how the boundary-spanning function of business models spurs firms to expand and strengthen the value network.The second study (Chapter 3) focused on the commercialisation stage, in which a cognitive change in the manager’s mind was found during the development of a sustainable business model. Based on three empirical cases of business model innovations for sustainability, the study explored how stakeholder interaction may trigger and support managerial cognitive change and hence business model innovation. The findings suggest that the influence of stakeholders on the manager’s understanding of the business runs via three interrelated shaping processes: market approach shaping, product and/or service offering shaping and credibility shaping. In these shaping processes, new or latent stakeholders are found to have a bigger impact than existing ones. A research agenda is presented to further unravel the role of stakeholders affecting managerial cognition around business model innovation for sustainability.The third study (Chapter 4) examined innovation ecosystems’ processes of developing a collaborative business model for sustainability. Based on a study of four sustainably innovative cross-sector collaborations, this chapter studied how innovation ecosystems resolve the tensions that emerge from the collaborating actors’ divergent goals and interests. This study finds that innovation ecosystems engage in a process of valuing value that helps the actors to manage the tensions and find a balance of environmental, social and economic value creation and capture that satisfies all involved actors. The findings reveal that valuing value occurs in two different patterns – collective orchestration and continuous search – that open up a research agenda that can shed further light on the conditions that need to be in place in order for an innovation ecosystem to develop effective sustainable business models. The final study (Chapter 5) used a design science approach, developing a tool for innovation ecosystems’ actors to manage the degree to which stakeholders are involved throughout the process of collaborative business modelling for sustainability. The resulting ‘degree of engagement diagram’ and accompanying stepwise approach makes it possible to identify stakeholders from six cross-sector stakeholder groups that represent economic, social and environmental aspects of sustainable value and visualise their roles. By discriminating between four concentric and permeable circles of engagement, the tool integrates different degrees of involvement of stakeholders and enables users of the DoE diagram to accommodate changes that may occur in the evolving business model and its context. The tool enables innovation ecosystems’ actors to keep the collaboration manageable during the development of a joint and viable sustainable business model. Overall, this thesis extends the understanding of the dynamics of collaborative business modelling for sustainability and the role of stakeholder interaction therein. The research makes three key contributions to the sustainable business model innovation literature. First, it extends the literature by exploring the interplay between stakeholder interaction and business modelling over time. It establishes that stakeholder interaction and business modelling have a reciprocal relationship and contributes with two frameworks – value shaping and valuing value – that explain this reciprocal relationship for firms and innovation ecosystems. Second, the thesis unravels the micro-processes and mechanisms that elucidate how stakeholder interaction actually influences the direction into which the sustainable business model develops. Third, this thesis enriches the scholarly understanding of stakeholder interaction by identifying the main contributors to business model innovation for sustainability, by differentiating between stakeholders and their roles and by providing a tool that accommodates this. The research contributes to practice by offering practitioners useful insights on how they can increase, improve and effectuate stakeholder interaction in order to develop viable business models for sustainability and hence contribute to the desired socio-technical transitions.

Defining collaborative business rules management solutions

From the publishers' website: The goal of this research is to define a method for configuring a collaborative business rules management solution from a value proposition perspective. In an earlier published study (Business rules management solutions: added value by means of business interoperability. In: van Sinderen M, Oude Luttighuis P, Folmer E, Bosms S (eds), International IFIP working conference on enterprise interoperability, vol 144. Springer, Twente, pp 145---157, 2013) we took a business rules perspective on interorganisational collaboration optimization, when we addressed the question what the relation was between types of business interoperability and an organisation's business rules management solution. Different types of collaboration were defined and subsequently combined with eleven identified types of service systems; these service systems together make up the business rules management solution. In this paper we re-address and -present our earlier work, yet based on the findings, we extend it with the construction of a method for determining the configuration of collaborative business rules management solutions. This method is tested by applying it to a case study at an alliance of airlines. Presented results provide a grounded basis from which empirical and practical research on business rules management solutions can be further explored.

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Collaborative business model experimentation for urban upcycling

Across Dutch municipalities, unusual collaborative initiatives emerge that aim to stimulate the creation of value from municipal waste resources. Circular economy literature proposes that experimentation competences are important for developing initiatives towards circular business models and a wide range of innovation frameworks and business model toolkits have been developed to support the development of circular business models based on experimentation.However, more insight is needed to understand how experimentation contributes to the development of urban upcycling initiatives, in particular those where collaborative business models are created. Literature suggest that business model experimentation occurs differently in various collaborative contexts. For example, depending on the type of initiating focal actors involved, collaborative business models develop along different pathways Therefore, we aim to understand how experimentation occurs in various types of collaborative urban upcycling initiatives and we investigate the following research question: How do stakeholders in collaborative urban upcycling initiatives use experimentation to develop circular business models?