How entrepreneurs may achieve sustainable business model configurations

This paper aims to investigate managerial and strategic practices to achieve sustainable business model configuration. Along the years, due to the significant number of long-term challenges, the concept of sustainability is rapidly attracting interest and a growing body of research emphasizes the need to achieve sustainable business models and to pivot traditional business models to more sustainable ones. This has much to do with business model innovation. Sustainable business model innovation attracted the appreciation of practitioners as well as a growing attention by entrepreneurship scholars since the actual incremental business practices seems to be inadequate to face the current social issue. Despite several considerations were drawn on the relationship between business model and sustainability, there is lack of clarity in understanding how to achieve sustainable business model configurations and the peculiar differences between a sustainable business model configuration and a more traditional one. A pressing and relevant question on this regard is “How do entrepreneurs achieve sustainable business model configurations?”. To fill this gap, our study draws on an exploratory multiple case study based on two sustainable new ventures. This study represents a step further in understanding managerial implications and boundary conditions, under which entrepreneurs may achieve sustainable business model configurations.