Sustainability for Business Models: Creating Common Ground About Problematic Assumptions

Businesses are increasingly in business to lead the charge against the world’s biggest problems. We contribute to the sustainable management literature by identifying and proposing unclear conceptual boundaries with sustainable assumptions that are largely unchallenged and confront the existing business model literature on sustainability with alternative points of interpretation. We map out problematic issues about the underlying theoretical assumptions of sustainability for business models and demonstrate different themes that are in a need of creating common ground for sustainability for business model researchers. Finally, we further critique these findings and set out a future research agenda with the aim to guide management scholarly conversations on rethinking business model research for sustainability.