Design Principles for Leveraging Sustainability in Business Modelling Tools

Sustainability has become increasingly important to business research and practice. Approaches that support fundamental changes in behaviour to act economically, ecologically and socially are required. Modelling and analysing business models can contribute to this, for example by generating new ideas and enabling innovation as well as improving and evaluating current businesses. Although, the interest in business model innovation is booming, and software tools for business model development hold great promise for supporting business model innovation, there is only limited support and guidance for a tool-support that enables a satisfactory consideration of sustainability. Furthermore, there is currently a lack of comprehensive knowledge concerning which features can contribute to this consideration, and how they can be implemented. In this article, we report on the results of design science research (DSR) study that develops a set of design principles for reflecting sustainability in business models, which are refined and evaluated in several cycles. Our findings can support practitioners in (re-)designing tools, selecting and innovating business models, and—for researchers—can serve as a step towards more advances theories regarding software tools for sustainability in business modelling as well as for creating new business model ideas