A Literature Review on Sustainable Business Model: first insights about the value measurement gap

Although business models have been extensively studied by researchers, latest trends have led organizations to rethink their way of doing business, focusing not only on profit, but also on social and environmental purposes. That’s why literature on sustainable business models (SBM) has been recently developed and is rapidly spreading. The purpose of this paper is to explore this body of literature, describing its temporal, industrial, geographical and methodological features, but also categorizing articles in terms of main purposes and specific themes addressed. To do so, we conducted an integrative literature review, which highlighted that SBM literature has so far focused on the descriptive analysis of case studies, on the process of innovation of the business model towards sustainability, or on the visual representation and design of the SBM, while a gap emerges in terms of quantitative analysis and performance measurement of SBM. As a result, a specific analysis on SBM articles dealing with the concept of value in its components of proposition, creation, delivery and capture was carried out: we found that authors mainly focused on extending the concept of value proposition and value creation and distribution, but only few of them addressed value capture and almost no one investigated how to measure it in an alternative way, compared to traditional business models. This paper ends by highlighting the research gap on sustainable business model value measurement and suggesting new ideas for future research.