Green and sustainable business models: historical roots, growth trajectory, conceptual architecture and an agenda for future research—A bibliometric review of green and sustainable business models

Abstract

Over the last two decades, green and sustainable business models (GnSBMs) have become a prominent topic of discussion among scholars, practitioners and policymakers. Preponderance of research and an increasing global pressure to adopt GnSBMs necessitate a comprehensive understanding of the state of research on GnSBMs. Towards this end, we extracted 851 publications on GnSBMs from the Scopus database and employed a series of bibliometrical techniques to: (1) explore the historical roots and sleeping beauties, (2) assess the life cycle, (3) map the conceptual evolution and (4) propose a research agenda for this growing field. Our analysis revealed that research on GnSBMs is moving from a multidisciplinary to an interdisciplinary domain. Its historical roots can be traced to the pioneering works on business strategy in the 1950s, environmental science in the early 1960s and stakeholder theory in the 1980s. Life cycle analysis indicated that research on GnSBM went through an introductory stage from 2002 to 2013 and then began to rapidly grow in 2014, and this growth is forecast to continue until circa 2040. The conceptual structures from 2002 to 2013 and 2014 to 2020 were mapped and an agenda for future research was proposed.