Towards a sufficiency-driven business model: experiences and opportunities

Business model innovation is an important lever for change to tackle pressing sustainability issues. In this paper, ‘sufficiency’ is proposed as a driver of business model innovation for sustainability. Sufficiency-driven business models seek to moderate overall resource consumption by curbing demand through education and consumer engagement, making products that last longer and avoiding built-in obsolescence, focusing on satisfying ‘needs’ rather than promoting ‘wants’ and fast-fashion, conscious sales and marketing techniques, new revenue models, or innovative technology solutions. This paper uses a case study approach to investigate how companies might use sufficiency as a driver for innovation and asserts that there can be a good business case for sufficiency. Business models of exemplar cases are analysed and insights are gained that will contribute to future research, policy makers and businesses interested in exploring sufficiency.This work was supported by SustainValue, a European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) and the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Industrial Sustainability (RG64858).This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from [publisher] via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2015.07.01