Sustainability Self-Assessment and Business Model Design

The business case of sustainability has been argued for by many authors (Willard, 2005; McNall et al., 2011). There is a large degree of consensus regarding the potential business impact of sustainability. However, most companies either are not acting or are falling short on execution (MIT Sloan, 2009). Relatively few companies consider innovation for sustainability substantially rewarding. Suggested solution for this includes better access to frameworks for understanding sustainability and value creation and the business cases thereof (MIT Sloan, 2009). Furthermore, it is well-known that support for generation and selection of ideas and for formulating goals and strategies is especially essential to have during the early phases of the innovation process (Roozenburg & Eekels, 1995). The usual absence of an operational definition of sustainability is still a major barrier to corporate strategic sustainable development (Holmberg & Robèrt, 2000). A sustainability definition that can guide assessment of the current situation and stimulate generation of ideas for upstream solutions and strategic guidelines that can aid prioritization of early smart actions are among the most promising leverage points. A framework including those features is being developed in an international consensus process since twenty years (see, e.g., Robèrt et al., 2012). Among other things, this framework for strategic sustainable development FSSD, clarifies the self-interest in sustainability work and thus supports more widespread and proactive sustainable innovation. In this study, the FSSD is used as the main basis for a new tool to be used in early phases of the innovation process for self-assessment of an organization’s current maturity and performance from an overall strategic sustainability point of view and for stimulating generation of ideas for business models design. We present a prototype version of such a tool and results from initial tests of this tool performed in four organizations. We study in particular whether the outlined tool is perceived by the organizations to be: (i) easy to comprehend, (ii) relevant, (iii) capable of differentiating the organizations in a comprehensive way, (iv) helpful for discovering insufficiencies that the organizations are not already aware of and (v) helpful for generation and selection of ideas for upstream solutions, business model innovation and for formulation of goals, and strategies.