Sustainable entrepreneurship on digital platforms and the enactment of digital connectivity through business models

Abstract

This article investigates how sustainable entrepreneurship on digital platforms enacts digital connectivity to capture and create value. By complementing the business model lens with sociomateriality, we theorize digital technologies as key actors that participate in the enactment of business models. We analyze visual and textual data from 19 entrepreneurial initiatives for sustainability established on the social media platform YouTube. Our findings demonstrate novel business model configurations enacted by a web of human and nonhuman (digital) actors: connecting for sustainability as part of the value proposition, forming connective spaces for socioenvironmental value creation, and leveraging connectivity for multidimensional value capture. These findings have two major contributions. First, we offer novel insights on the practices that configure business model elements of sustainable entrepreneurship on platforms. We especially draw attention to how digital connectivity of platforms is achieved and made durable by human and digital actors. Second, we elaborate on how digital agencies intervene in entrepreneurial efforts to make sustainability visible and how this affects the business models. Thus, the study contributes to and further develops the intersection of digital technologies, sustainable entrepreneurship, and business models.