Business Models and Innovation Platform
The Business Models and Innovation Platform examines how business models and emerging technologies can drive the sustainable development of industries and communities. It focuses on how firms create economic value within planetary boundaries, while promoting social justice and equity.
About
Businesses are increasingly expected to avoid contributing to environmental degradation and social injustice, while remaining competitive. This platform examines how innovation can fundamentally transform how companies access, use, create and capture value from resources within natural ecosystems.
A key focus is on how markets and new business models can unlock value from nature. Mechanisms such as carbon credits and conservation banking enable ecosystem services to be valued, priced and traded. However, they also face challenges, including information asymmetries and moral hazard. This research examines how these issues are perceived and addressed by firms and institutions.
The platform applies these insights across areas such as supply chains, circular economy models, family businesses, and public procurement. The goal is to support more effective, efficient and responsible use of natural resources.
Examples of research questions
- How can new business models enable firms to create greater economic value while staying within planetary boundaries?
- What role do market mechanisms play in valuing ecosystem services and fostering the regeneration of nature and communities?
- How can firms balance short-term productivity with long-term environmental resilience?
Platform Director
Matts Carlgren Professor of Business Administration
Department of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology
Stockholm School of Economics
Research projects
Below you will find a selection of research projects from the Business Models and Innovation Platform. They focus on how organizations drive sustainable transformation across industries and communities by developing new market solutions, rethinking value creation, and improving inclusion, resilience, and resource use in both local and global contexts.
Ongoing projects
Creating markets for forest ecosystem services: Investigating novel technologies and business models
HoSS researchers:
- Mattia Bianchi, Professor, Department of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology, SSE
- Ricardo Coelho da Silva, Postdoc Fellow, Department of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology, SSE
- Suvi Nenonen, Professor, Department of Marketing and Strategy, SSE
Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes offer financial incentives to landowners for the conservation, restoration, and expansion of forests, creating value beyond timber through carbon storage and biodiversity. Despite growing interest, PES markets remain small, partly because these services are seen as public goods and research is fragmented across fields.
This project takes an entrepreneurial perspective, examining how organizations make PES viable in practice. Focusing on business models, it combines desk research, case studies, and action research to identify common challenges and opportunities. The study contributes to research on sustainable business by showing how new markets can form around historically non-commercial goods, while offering practical insights to strengthen the forest sector through more diverse and sustainable value creation.
Project dates: July 2025 to June 2029
The project is funded by the Marianne och Marcus Wallenbergs Foundation, grant no. MMW 2024.0108
Rooted yet transitioning: evolving senses of place and sustainability of Swedish forest owners II
HoSS researchers:
- Mattia Bianchi, Professor, Department of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology, SSE
- Maria Cecilia Flores, SSE
Other researchers and collaborators:
- Renate Kratochvil, SSE
- Santi Furnari, Bayes Business School, University City of London
Forests are pivotal to Sweden's national strategy for sustainable development and the transition away from fossil fuels. Yet, the diversity of private forest owners' views on sustainable forest management creates a complex interplay between wood production, social, and environmental goals. This project examines how emotional attachments to land shape forest owners' decision-making, practices, and behaviors. Specifically, it explores how affective ties between owners and their forests – rooted in personal histories, identities, and lived experiences – influence their managerial choices. Forest owners navigate a contested landscape of competing demands, stakeholder pressures, and conflicting interests, all of which matter for how they manage their land. The project investigates how these emotional and contextual dimensions together shape concrete management practices today and owners' aspirations for the future of their forests. The findings aim to inform theories of sustainable entrepreneurship, offering strategic implications for the forestry industry, policymakers, and rural development initiatives.
Project dates: January 2025 to December 2026
The project is funded by the Lars Erik Lundbergs Foundation for Research and Education, grant no. E-2024-1003912.
Organizing for social and environmental conditions in emerging markets’ supply chains: The bottom-up perspective of third-tier suppliers
HoSS researcher:
- Enrico Fontana, Cranfield University
Other researchers:
- Atif Khan, EDC Paris
The more we move upstream in emerging markets’ supply chains, the less we know about social and environmental conditions. Against the backdrop of the Pakistani apparel supply chain, this project seeks to better understand what the social and environmental conditions are at the level of raw material supplier firms (third-tier cotton bale sellers), and how they are managed. The researchers are particularly interested in examining the bottom-up perspective of managers, workers and other individuals in the local context of production as they organize for the provision of raw materials between local dynamics and global performance pressures. The project seeks to contribute to organization theories and conversations in the field of supply chains, and links with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) and 12 (Responsible Production and Consumption).
Project dates: September 2023 – December 2026
Performance management for a sustainable future: Exploring the feasibility of prosocial assumptions
HoSS researchers:
- Sarah Jack, Professor, Department of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology, SSE
- Jan Pfister, University of Turku
Other collaborating institutions:
- United Arab Emirates University
- ESCP Paris
- University of California at Berkeley
- Lancaster University
Performance management and management control systems (MCS) research often assumes that people act mainly out of self-interest and may avoid responsibilities when given the chance. This project argues that such assumptions can shape organizational cultures in ways that reinforce selfish or antisocial behavior rather than prevent it.
The study explores how organizations can encourage prosocial behavior as a way to address major societal challenges. Drawing on the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom, the researchers develop a new approach to performance management based on cooperation and shared responsibility. While self-interested individuals may outperform others within groups, the project assumes that groups built on prosocial values perform better overall. The researchers examine this approach across several contexts, including academic research culture, public administration, the technology and finance industries, gender equality, and poverty alleviation.
Project dates: September 2022 to August 2026
The project is funded by the Academy of Finland.
Reframing the forest sector: investigating the emergence of innovations as drivers of industry transformation
HoSS researcher:
- Mattia Bianchi, Professor, Department of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology, SSE
Innovations, manifested as new products, services, business models, or technologies, have the potential to drive broad, paradigmatic shifts within industries. This research project investigates how emerging innovations are reshaping the forest sector.
In the Nordic countries of Europe, there is a widespread belief that the current, production-centric forest sector needs systemic changes to properly address severe environmental problems like climate change and biodiversity preservation. The strategy of increasing wood extraction, as championed by bioeconomy proponents, to substitute fossil-based, carbon-intensive materials, may result in higher GHG emissions and biodiversity loss. These dilemmas have sparked polarized, politically charged discourses among forest stakeholders, most prominently in Sweden. Rooted at the heart of these discourses are the disparate cognitive frames of these stakeholders, leading to divergent beliefs on the fundamental value and meaning of forests to humanity.
The research hinges on the concept of 'reframing' – a shift from established cognitive frames to novel ones, potentially gaining prominence and eliciting consensus among stakeholders – as the foundation for transformative innovations.
Sustainable green gold? Mapping the plurality of value creation logics and agentic change efforts in the market transformation of the Nordic forestry sector
HoSS researchers:
- Suvi Nenonen, Professor, Department of Marketing and Strategy, SSE
- Kaisa Koskela-Huotari, Assistant Professor, Department of Marketing and Strategy, SSE
Markets can be efficient mechanisms for allocating resources. Extant sustainability research has primarily focused on market regulation and the creation of dedicated marketplaces, e.g., for emissions trading, thus overlooking other ways of transforming markets for increased sustainability. Before it is possible to shift from this reactive “fixing market-failures” approach to a more proactive “shaping markets for sustainability”, research is needed on how different conceptions of value and value creation logics influence markets and market-shaping.
This project is an in-depth case study in the Nordic forestry sector where the plurality of value creation logics and shaping efforts is visible in the increasing tensions between biodiversity, carbon offsets, renewable energy, recreation, and traditional industrial uses of wood. The research explores how to make individual firms more sustainable and how to shape markets for improved economic – but not environmental or social – outcomes. It provides a toolkit to identify and navigate conflicting value creation logics and shaping efforts that often obstruct needed sustainability transformations.
Project dates: January 2023 to December 2026
The project is funded by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (RJ).
Understanding the human body as a source of emancipation: A focus on marginalized entrepreneurs
HoSS researchers:
- Enrico Fontana, Cranfield University
- Mette Morsing, Oxford University
Other researchers and institutions:
- Sanne Frandsen, Lund University
In this project the researchers aim to better understand the ways that the human body can serve as a tool to help entrepreneurs in disenfranchised contexts of the Global South to alleviate constraints of marginalization. They draw on multiple sources of data collected over the past few years and, while paying special attention to gender non-conforming persons, they observe how marginalized entrepreneurs strategize around their body to realize business opportunities and improve their lives. The project lies at the crossroads between the entrepreneurship as emancipation literature and the organizational aesthetics literature. In practice, it connects with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 1 (No Poverty) and 10 (Reduce Inequalities).
Project dates: August 2021 – December 2026
Completed projects
Migrants’ integration in EU countries: for a selected few only?
HoSS researchers:
- Laurence Romani, Professor, Department of Management and Organization, SSE
Other researchers or collaborators:
- 10 partner universities from the CIVICA alliance
The MERITA seed project brings together an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the CIVICA alliance, spanning management, sociology, political sciences, economics and law, to investigate shifts in how EU member states think about and practice the integration of people with a migration background. Individual migrants are increasingly seen as responsible for their own integration and there is therefore less responsibility placed on host societies. In addition, who is to be integrated and on what grounds are also changing, meaning that a certain value regime now underlies defined grounds for integration.
The project explored two central research questions: the logics of thinking on integration and the implications of these logics, leading to the possible creation of increased social and racial inequality in societies. The main result of the project is the development of a larger research program.
Project dates: March 2023 to February 2024
The project was funded by CIVICA research.
RECIRCULATE: Capacity-building for a safe circular water economy
HoSS researchers:
- Mary Kathleen Fitzpatrick Burke, Postdoctoral Associate, University at Buffalo
- Sarah Jack, Professor, Department of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology, SSE
Other researchers:
- Rhiannon Pugh, Lund University
- Afua Owusu-Kwarteng, Lancaster University
Main project stakeholder:
- Centre for Global Eco-Innovation (CGE), Lancaster University
Other collaborators:
- Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (Ghana)
- University of Benin (Nigeria)
RECIRCULATE is an international, interdisciplinary research partnership centered around goals of solution-focused research, community engagement, and business-research collaboration. The aim is to enable scientific researchers and entrepreneurs across Africa to grow transformational impact through working “with, in and for” their communities through an equitable approach to partnerships.
Project dates: 2017-2022
The project is funded by UK Research and Innovation through the Global Challenge Research Fund (GRCF).
Sustainability and entrepreneurship in family businesses
HoSS researcher:
- Sarah Jack, Professor of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology, SSE
This project focused on sustainability and entrepreneurship in different types of family business settings. One part of the project looked at how large, multigenerational business family groups (e.g., the Wallenberg family) organize for sustainability in the companies in which they are engaged as owners - either directly or through the Wallenberg foundations. As well as how they integrate sustainability as a core part of their strategies for the companies. The other part of the project looked at how entrepreneurial families can build engagement with entrepreneurship by developing or investing in new sustainable ventures, and stay close to their core values of long-term orientation and the importance of sustainable business practices.
Public procurement of functions – A stepping stone towards a more sustainable future
HoSS researcher:
- Sarah Jack, Professor of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology, SSE
Other researchers and collaborators:
- Margo Enthoven, SSE
- Linköping University
- Örebro University
Main project stakeholder:
- Huddinge Municipality
The research team investigated how circular business models and circular procurement models are co-developed between public and private parties. Their research took place in the market for work clothing in Sweden and includes both public buyers and private suppliers. Both parties experience disincentives to change for sustainability, which leads to a market situation whereby sustainable change cannot be brought about if both suppliers and procurers act as per the status quo. To break out of this situation, procurers step out of their role as buyer and take on a role as a solution orchestrator. The final ‘function’ that is procured exists as several partial solutions in the market. It does not exist as an integrated solution in the market without the procurer as a spider in the web, knitting the different elements of the integrated solution together.
Project dates: 2020 - 2022
Project funded by Marianne & Marcus Wallenberg Stiftelse.
Targeted-MPI
HoSS researcher:
- Sarah Jack, Professor of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology, SSE
The TARGETED-MPI project responded directly to the Horizon H2020-SwafS-09-2018-2019 call under the topic support to Higher Education and Research Organisations to implement Gender Equality Plans (GEPs).
The project focused specifically on institutional changes through the development and effective implementation of Gender Equality Plans (GEPs) in Business and Management (B&M) schools to drive more inclusive, sustainable and transparent academic cultures. In this endeavour, a number of substantial challenges arise which can be classified into three main categories: i) overall role of women in academia, ii) Gender Equality in B&M schools and iii) the TARGETED-MPI project context.
From rural poverty to Smart Villages
HoSS researchers:
- Jan Pfister, Senior Lecturer, Department of Accounting and Finance, University of Turku
- Sarah Jack, Professor at the Department of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology, SSE
This research project aimed at understanding and explaining how different stakeholders, including government, start-ups, medium and large companies, universities, and rural villagers in emerging countries, can be orchestrated to uplift poor rural communities. The project employed ethnographic field research methods and explored the emergence of the Smart Village Movement (SVM) in India, an initiative from the University of California at Berkeley to empower poor rural communities through digital technologies and co-innovation platforms and give them access to global markets and networks, bringing new knowledge, capabilities, and wealth flows in a responsible manner. The SVM focuses on eight areas it aims to improve in the rural communities: agriculture, connectivity, education, energy, health care, livelihood, sanitation, and water. Hence, this research builds on the assumption that rather than pursuing individual bottom of the pyramid initiatives, the broader social embeddedness of poor communities needs to be co-created with them to facilitate bridging social capital, while preserving their existing bonding social capital.
This interdisciplinary project operated in cooperation with the Center for Growth Markets and the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, USA. Individual projects are pursued in collaboration with leading scholars in the fields of entrepreneurship, information systems, and innovation.
