An Ontology for Strongly Sustainable Business Models

TLDR

Business increasingly adopts sustainability practices to improve environmental and social responsibility while maintaining profitability, yet profit‑oriented models constrain progress and a formally defined ontology for such models has been used globally for years. The study aims to develop an ontology that enables the description of successful strongly sustainable business models, filling the gap left by the absence of such an ontology. The authors performed a comparative analysis of their proposed ontology against the Osterwalder profit‑oriented ontology and introduced the new ontology to resolve identified weaknesses. The transdisciplinary review yielded a framework of propositions and principles for strongly sustainable business models.

Abstract

Business is increasingly employing sustainability practices, aiming to improve environmental and social responsibility while maintaining and improving profitability. For many organizations, profit-oriented business models are a major constraint impeding progress in sustainability. A formally defined ontology, a model definition, for profit-oriented business models has been employed globally for several years. However, no equivalent ontology is available in research or practice that enables the description of strongly sustainable business models, as validated by ecological economics and derived from natural, social, and system sciences. We present a framework of strongly sustainable business model propositions and principles as findings from a transdisciplinary review of the literature. A comparative analysis was performed between the framework and the Osterwalder profit-oriented ontology for business models. We introduce an ontology that enables the description of successful strongly sustainable business models that resolves weaknesses and includes functionally necessary relationships.