Business models for environmental sustainability: Contemporary shortcomings and some perspectives

Funding information European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Grant/Award Number: Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement 753274 Abstract Recently, business models for environmental sustainability have gained increasing attention in the management field and among practitioners and stakeholders. This study aims to analyse the state of the art on the topic by reviewing the growing but mainly phenomenon-driven research. In particular, by identifying main research trends and relevant gaps in the literature and by providing future research avenues, this paper advances the debate on the need for alternative concepts of doing business that go beyond the creation of economic value for a company in a way that generates value for the society. Our article undertakes two stages of screening the available literature and selects 151 peer-reviewed articles published between 2007 and early 2019 for the review. The paper provides the first comprehensive systematic review of business models in the field of environmental sustainability with a detailed descriptive and critical analysis and with a discussion of future research opportunities.


| INTRODUCTION
In line with major international reports such as the UN (United Amit, & Massa, 2011). In general, research on BM is concerned on how firms realize the creation and appropriation of economic value (Teece, 2010).
Despite the increasing number of papers, there is a gap towards (i) a comprehensive systematic review at the intersection of BMs and ES, based on a rigorous methodology (Tranfield, Denyer, & Smart, 2003), and (ii) strategic conclusions for further BM research in In line with our aim above, the specific novel contributions of our paper are as follows: 1. We provide, at the best of our knowledge, the first comprehensive review of the studies on BMs in the framework of a wide ES concept, to debate in a critical way the current research on the topic.
2. The review includes the first full descriptive and critical analysis of different aspects characterizing the studies on the topic, not focusing only on few ES aspects, but taking also into account the multiple dimensions of ES in a unique study. We shed light on relevant trends and journals; on the economic or industrial sectors covered by the studies; and on the methods used.
3. This study includes a framework of all theoretical perspectives used in the existing studies on BMs and ES, by helping to set the topic under specific theoretical lens and mapping the subtopics.
4. By contributing through a systematic review of the literature, this study also suggests a critically informed agenda to inspire future research opportunities on the topic. By doing this, the study suggests some research avenues to offer a strategic platform whereby future researchers could build on our ideas to further develop research on BMs for sustainability.
5. Our paper aims also to support companies and practitioners to choose and adopt a proper BM in the case of green strategies, as it is essential to create and appropriate value from ES activities rather than just complying with the law. In this sense, this paper can support companies and practitioners to match value creation-consisting of societal benefits arising from green activities-with value appropriation in terms of profit capture at the firm level.
The paper is organized as follows. After a section describing the method adopted to systematically review the literature, we report the results of the selection and analysis of 151 articles on BMs and ES. Analysed papers have been published in the period of 2007 to mid-January 2019, as BM has become pivotal in the business research in the last years (Spieth, Schneckenberg, & Ricart, 2014;Zott et al., 2011). A descriptive section is included as part of the results of this review. Moreover, an in-depth analysis covering the research streams covered by the reviewed papers is provided. The paper then offers key insights on potential future research avenues on the topic.
The final part of the paper provides some conclusions based on the results of the review.

| METHOD
For the review section, we adopted a systematic approach, as it represents a rigorous method aiming to produce reliable knowledge in the management field (Tranfield et al., 2003). Specifially, we adopted the three phases identified by Tranfield et al. (2003): planning, conducting and reporting and dissemination.

| Planning
In the planning phase, the aims of the review and the specific research questions of a systematic review on BMs in the context of ES have been defined. With the aim to provide a rich descriptive analysis of the studies on the topic, the paper aims to explore different aspects.
One of these is the evolution trend of studies on BMs and ES in the last more recent decade. Another aspect is to investigate the relevance of this topic in the academic journals, taking into account the number of articles published. The industrial sectors covered by those studies, including the methods used, are explored. In addition, we aim to understand the theoretical perspectives that those papers apply.
As the topic of BMs is even more important in the framework of ES , this review also aims to reply to the following

| Conducting
In the conducting phase, we first collected sources from the ISI Web of Knowledge Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) database, as it is considered as one of the most complete databases including peerreviewed journals in the area of social sciences (Crossan & Apaydin, 2010). The field of BMs and ES is largely rooted in the social sciences, but also includes interdisciplinary journals that are not listed in the SSCI. We decided to not use a larger journal list initially as such a list would have been impractical, because it would have generated an excessive number of abstracts for manual inspection; the great majority of which would have had to be rejected.
We restricted the sources of data to peer-reviewed journals (Podsakoff, Mackenzie, Bachrach, & Podsakoff, 2005 Chesbrough, 2007aChesbrough, , 2007bZott & Amit, 2007;Chesbrough & Schwartz, 2007) to mid-January 2019 because in the last years, the research on BM has become pivotal (Spieth et al., 2014;Zott et al., 2011). The research has been performed between early February 2018 and mid-January 2019. The initial result of this research on the database included 1,502 papers.
The first selection and assessment of the collected studies have been carried out by reading the abstract of all papers to identify whether the ES topic was included in each study. This first screening allowed to select 140 papers for further analysis. Then, we agreed to restrict the study to some criteria to proceed with the research. The first inclusion criterion was that a paper must deal with the BM topic and with the ES topic in a non-marginal way (Zott et al., 2011). The second criterion refers to the fact that each article should consider the BM in the case of private organizations (and not referred, e.g., to public organizations, consumers or cities) as the aim of this study is to refer the BM topic to business firms (Zott et al., 2011). After having defined the two criteria, a second screening has been performed, by reading the full content of the 140 papers. The result consisted of a sample of 61 selected papers.
In order to make the review fully comprehensive, as environmen-  Figure 1 illustrates both stages of conducting our research, the criteria and the resulting final sample.

| Reporting and dissemination
In the reporting and dissemination phase of the systematic review, we described the collected and screened studies and we replied to the defined research questions. To do that, we applied one of the key principles of a good systematic review defined by Tranfield et al. (2003). In particular, we categorized the information of the papers to address two objectives. The first one was to synthetize the collected information through a descriptive analysis of the topic investigated. Second, the categorization of information has also been performed with the aim to reply to the research ques- The results of the third phase of the systematic review are included in the following section.

| RESULTS
The first section on the results is based on a descriptive analysis of the sample of the selected papers.

| Descriptive analysis
The 151  issues are more relevant in terms of number of papers. Table 1 includes details on the other journals.  We also analysed the economic sectors represented in the sample ( Figure 3). Many studies (n = 32) do not specify the sector taken into account. This is due to the fact that the sector analysed is not mentioned or the paper has not analysed any sector in particular (e.g., this is the case for conceptual papers). A high number of papers (n = 33) deal with multiple sectors, meaning two or more. The energy field is highly represented (18 papers), and this reflects the importance of the sector in the framework of ES. Chemical and plastic, tourism and other professional sectors (e.g., design) are the less represented sectors.

| Research streams: Key insights from the existing studies
The studies selected for the review faced multiple and heterogeneous topics and investigated different research questions. The details of our analysis of the investigated fields are reported below. The analysed literature showed that the research area of BMs and ES is very rich and huge in terms of subtopics addressed, spanning from the T A B L E 1 Journals and number of the papers on business models and environmental sustainability Name of the journal

| First stream of research: Description, characteristics and typologies of sustainable BMs
There are several papers dealing with the description of BMs for sus-

Aspects of sustainable BMs
Some authors focused on specific aspects or dimensions of sustain-  Wells, 2016). Some studies deal with BMs in mining (Bini, Bellucci, & Giunta, 2018) and bioplastic fashion industry (Iles & Martin, 2013).
Finally, the paper of Bocken (2015)  However, we found that these articles are mainly descriptive rather than based on a critical analysis of characteristics, features and dimensions of BMs. The wide but fragmented framework related to these multiple descriptive contributions allows discussing potential F I G U R E 3 The sectors represented in the papers. ICT, information and communications technology new research avenues based on more analytical analysis of BMs. The contribution we propose is discussed in the last section of this paper.

Servicizing BMs
Going more in depth to specify specific BMs, there is a part of the literature that deals with servicizing BMs (Corvellec & Stal, 2017;Liu, Chen, Tu, & Wang, 2014;Överholm, 2017), which are BMs related to the selling of the product use instead of the products itself (Agrawal & Bellos, 2017 There is also a review paper (Boons & Bocken, 2018) dealing with the impact of sharing BMs for personal mobility. The analysis of the papers shows that the area of BM and the sharing economy is mainly focused on mobility. The literature on BM promoting a sharing economy appears to be almost fragmented; it highlights the need to further investigate the relations with other kinds of BMs as also with the ecosystem, as the sharing economy is perceived as a complex process of social change, as clearly identified by Boons and Bocken (2018).

BMs for CE
The development of BMs is a crucial aspect of the research on CE (Chen, Hung, & Ma, 2020;Merli, Preziosi, & Acampora, 2018 we found a gap related to the depiction of the social aspects linked to BMs for CE. We propose more research on BMs for CE by also taking into account social consideration in the last section of the paper.

| Second stream of research: Theoretical perspectives on BMs for ES
The analysis of the theoretical perspectives adopted by studies on BMs and ES at the organizational level allowed us to explore the theories applied. Most of the papers (n = 134, corresponding to 89% of the sample) tended not to be conveyed on a strong theoretical base.
This means that those studies did not explicitly refer to a theoretical position and rather usually include BM literature instead of a real and strong theoretical base. Only 17 papers (11% of the sample) included a theory in the study. Most commonly used theories were the stakeholder theory and the resource-based view theory (four papers each), followed by institutional theories (three papers). The high use of the stakeholder theory may be explained by the fact that it is one of the most popular theories in the management field; it has also been largely adopted in the area of sustainable business (Daddi, Todaro, De Giacomo, & Frey, 2018). The stakeholder theory is based on a strong role of stakeholders in the strategies setting at a firm level; for this reason, this theoretical perspective may be particularly useful in studies on BMs and sustainability, where the adoption of sustainable strategies is usually a core topic. The resource-based view theory deals with understanding the firm's competitive advantages (and the related value-creating strategies) based on multiple resources of a firm. The popular use of this theoretical approach by studies on BMs and sustainability may be explained by the need to know, among others, the relationship between value creation (which is a key element of BMs) and the adoption of sustainable resources at a firm level.
The dynamic capability theory, grounded theory and resource dependence theory have been included in two papers each. Other theories, such as adaptive co-management, adaptive, agency, evolutionary, market-based view, multilevel perspective, network, and option theories, have been used in one paper each.
The analysis we performed on the theoretical lens used in the papers suggests the debate on BMs and ES at the organizational level is mainly atheoretical or, alternatively, the implicit theoretical positions that are guiding how researchers think are not being critically examined and explicitly reported. This result may be justified by the evidence that the topic is rather driven by a phenomenon perspective.
The low level of theoretical perspectives adopted in the research on BMs for sustainability allows us to discuss the need to develop more research based on the development of theoretical perspectives in the BMs area. Our ideas are included in the last section of the paper.  (Maniora, 2017). Assessing environmental impacts requires a method such as LCA; it involves the monitoring and reporting efforts of companies. As a result of those activities, firms discover a need to innovate in order to meet environmental goals. Thus, our paper also includes studies on BMI here. There is an increasing and recent attention by research on the topic of BMI. This is unsurprising given the nature of the challenges business faces as a response to ES, for instance, decisions to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. BMI has been defined in multiple ways by the literature, but in general, it can be considered as a 'process that deliberately changes the core elements of a firm and its business logic' (Bucherer, Eisert, & Gassmann, 2012, p. 184 -Freund, & Hansen, 2016;van Bommel, 2018). Also, the area of drivers for BMI is explored in some papers (Rantala, Ukko, Saunila, & Havukainen, 2018;Zollo, Cennamo, & Neumann, 2013), and a number of papers deal with BMI in the case of specific sectors, such as energy (Bolton & Hannon, 2016;Rossignoli & Lionzo, 2018), biogas (Karlsson, Hoveskog, Halila, & Mattsson, 2018), construction (Zhao, Chang, Hwang, & Deng, 2018), building (Leising, Quist, & Bocken, 2018;Zhao, Chang, et al., 2018;Zhao, Pan, & Chen, 2018) or other innovative firms (Karlsson, Halila, Mattsson, & Hoveskog, 2017).

| Fourth stream of research: BMs and performance
The aspects related to the company performance are pivotal in the BM area, as BM may help to clarify how firms link to value creation and value appropriation. Some papers of the sample paid attention in particular on how to link financial performance with sustainability performance ( •Product-service system BMs to explore factors that affect environmental performance.
Six factors were identified to analyse business practices.
transition. We discuss this potential research avenue at the end of the paper.  BMs related to specific sectors may be enriched and expanded by exploring the social value they create, in addition to economic and environmental value, in a way to go beyond the traditional BMs (Brozovic, 2019). Further research in this sense may include how the specific kinds of BMs may contribute to the triple bottom line impact of business (Elkington, 1998

| Research avenue no. 2: Theoretical perspectives
This study revealed how the BMs and ES area of research is mainly phenomenon driven rather than theoretical. These findings confirm the previous literature stating that BM research is theoretically underdeveloped (Teece, 2010;Zott et al., 2011). Taking (Freeman, 1994).
Future research may use the stakeholder theory to study BMs for ES with the aim to take into account not only environmental aspects but also societal outcomes (Breuer, Ludeke-Freund, & Brick, 2018).
This could be particularly relevant as the stakeholder theory has been adopted by the management literature as crucial for the comprehension and the description of business and societal relationships (Wood & Jones, 1995). This theory helps to understand how different interests of external stakeholders generate pressures on companies to achieve both social and financial results (Donaldson & Preston, 1995).
The higher level of theorization of BMs research through the use of the stakeholder theory might help to clarify the relationships among persons and companies, with the aim to understand stakeholders' influences on business decisions (Maon, Lindgreen, & Swaen, 2010) and the social impacts of the organizations coming from their BMs.
This objective is in line with the view that stakeholders cannot be treated exclusively as a means to business aims (Evan & Freeman, 1988). In this sense, a more inclusive consideration of people's interests, in addition to business and corporate ones, will enable to consider BMs as a means to create public value in addition to economic value for a company. This will help to expand theoretical research on social BMs, which has actually received little attention (Spieth, Schneider, Clauß, & Eichenberg, 2019). The adoption of the stakeholder theory to study BMs will clarify how companies share the value created and what is their responsibility towards stakeholders, by clarifying empirically and theoretically what differentiates social BMs from traditional ones (Spieth et al., 2019). This will elucidate how companies adopting BMs for sustainability want to do business and what typologies of relationships they should establish with their stakeholders to achieve their objectives (Freeman, Wicks, & Parmar, 2004). This proposed research avenue may help to acknowledge the impacts of business activities and strategies at a public level (Maon et al., 2010) and their contribution to a sustainable transition.

| Research avenue no. 3: Design of BMs for ES and organizational capabilities required
There is a restricted number of studies focusing on how companies may integrate sustainability into their BMs. One of the future research avenues may explore with concrete case studies on companies and how they do this integration, by also comparing different cases and thus expand the actual samples of studies.
Moreover, future studies may also explore the integration of the company's social mission, in addition to the environmental ones, in their BMs. In particular, those studies may clarify the design and the redesign of firms activities and the integration of social value in products and services, including the value chain and the stake-  (Demil & Lecocq, 2015;Furnari, 2015;Martins, Rindova, & Greenbaum, 2015;Massa, Tucci, & Afuah, 2017;Täuscher & Abdelkafi, 2017), but few of them are related to the ES area.
Considering that the adoption of new BMs, such as those for ES, requires organizational changes, it is surprising that our review found no studies that explored the cognitive dimension linked to organizational adaptation. The relevance of managerial cognition in the context of organizational adaption and capabilities has been stated by the literature (Helfat & Peteraf, 2015;Teece, 2007;Tripsas & Gavetti, 2000). Studies on organizational cognition (Meindl, Stubbart, & Porac, 1994)

| Research avenue no. 4: BMs and performance
The review found that studies on BMs and performance are quite important. Linking BMs for ES with performance is pivotal in addressing whether and how they create value.
One of the key research opportunities in light of the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) is to develop studies on BMs to address not only environmental and economic issues but also societal challenges (Breuer et al., 2018;Cocquyt, Crucke, & Slabbinck, 2020). In particular, SDG 17 aims to direct efforts of multiple actors-business included-to deal with social problems involving present societies (Calabrese et al., 2018). BMs can be further explored as an alternative concept of doing business that goes beyond the creation of economic value for a company, in a form that determines value for the society (Meyskens, Robb-Post, Stamp, Carsrud, & Reynolds, 2010) and generates public value (Nicholls, 2009). Interestingly, there is recent research about redefining the nature of the firm towards human purposes (Mayer, 2018) that is yet to be aligned with ES. Common themes to start with could address energy poverty, access to clean water, affordable and low-carbon housing and climate catastrophes (Hahn, 2012). This research gap originates from a tension between creating value at a social level and capturing value at a private (business and organizational) level (Smith, Gonin, & Besharov, 2013;Spieth et al., 2019). Some scholars have stated this kind of tensions between the two (Chowdhury, Gruber, & Zolkiewski, 2016;Ritala & Hurmelinna-Laukkanen, 2009), seeing a contradictory yet interrelated relationship between value creation and value capture (Niesten & Stefan, 2019).
Tensions can depend on conflicting mechanisms related to create or to capture value (Niesten & Stefan, 2019). For example, value creation at a social level takes into account the opportunity 'to create social value by stimulating social change or meeting social needs' (Mair & Marti, 2006, p. 37), whereas value capture at a private level requires appropriation mechanisms (Veer, Lorenz, & Blind, 2016) at the managerial level (Capaldo & Petruzzelli, 2011).
We suggest to further explore the relationships among value creation at a social level and value appropriation at a private level. This new research avenue may clarify how companies pursuing economic value through green BMs and strategies may also create public value and maintain a competitive advantage at the same time. This stream of research is in line with the view of a systemic business transformation to achieve sustainability at a wider level (Loorbach, van Bakel, Whiteman, & Rotmans, 2010;Loorbach & Wijsman, 2013). By contributing to social value, business will be able to participate in systemic challenges involving multiple actors (business, government, civil society) in order to accelerate the process towards sustainability. This stream of research will also address the existing lack of research on business practices aiming to modify the way societal systems act to overcome environmental and social issues (Starik & Marcus, 2000). Future studies on this area may help to clarify the position of organizations in the context of a broader system and define their role in contributing to systemic change to achieve sustainability outcomes at a wider level.
The research we propose aiming to understand how BMs can be an alternative concept of doing business can help to advance knowledge on how BMs for ES can address sustainability through the triple bottom line perspective, containing the economic, environmental and social dimensions (Joyce & Paquin, 2016). In addition, this new field of research may help to clarify how organizations generate various types of value-economic, environmental and social. As part of this proposed stream of research, BMs can be explored also as a means of social profit generation, other than a financial profit generation (Yunus et al., 2010).

| CONCLUDING REMARKS
The novel contribution of this paper is, to the best of our knowl-

FUNDING INFORMATION
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement 753274.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors would like to thank Professor Will McDowall for his constructive comments on the paper.