Green virtual enterprise breeding environments bag of assets management: A contribution to the sharing economy

Abstract

Green Virtual Enterprise Breeding Environments (GVBEs) are longterm strategic alliances of green enterprises and their related support institutions aimed at offering the necessary conditions to efficiently promote and establish common working and sharing principles with the intention of creating sustainable (shared) value in a collaborative way. The Sharing Economy (SE) is founded on the principle of maximising the utility of assets and other shareable resources by means of renting, lending, swapping, bartering and giving them away in order to avoid their idle existence, and is currently being facilitated by emerging collaborative business ICT infrastructures in the marketplace and society. The SE provides the ability to GVBE members to unlock the untapped social, economic and environmental value of their underutilised assets and other shareable resources towards higher resource efficiency. This paper explores the enabling role of the GVBE bag of assets as a virtual and physical warehouse, including collaborative procurement and shareable assets management strategies, in order to facilitate the sharing of tangible and intangible resources between GVBE members. The GVBE bag of assets is put forward as a novel internal sustainable business model, based on a conceptual framework, taking advantage of idle assets and other shareable resources within the breeding environment in order to save costs and generate new revenue streams (economic), make efficient use of resources (environment) and create deeper social connections – trust – among member enterprises (social).