The role of business models for sustainable consumption: A pattern approach

Abstract

Chapter 6, ‘The role of business models for sustainable consumption: A pattern approach’ by Florian Lüdeke-Freund, Tobias Froese and Stefan Schaltegger explores the role of business models in shifting towards more sustainable consumption patterns and levels. The main ideas discussed in this chapter relate to the role of business models in supporting strong sustainable consumption (SSC), different sustainability strategies and how sustainable business model patterns can become a means to design better production-consumption systems. These ideas can serve as a starting point for more comprehensive and balanced debates about how companies, that is, the major designers of modern production-consumption systems, can contribute to strong sustainable consumption. The authors ask readers to go beyond the often heard calls for efficiency and sufficiency business models, which too often ignore that neither sustainability strategies nor business models unfold in a vacuum. Hence, it is important to consider multiple sustainability strategies and multiple business model design options simultaneously. The authors, therefore, call for approaches that consider both multiple sustainability strategies and multiple business model patterns in order to create better production-consumption systems that could help humanity to navigate through the increasingly narrowing ‘strong sustainable consumption corridor’.