Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group

= "How can organizations ... contribute to a new sustainable economy"?

URL = http://wiki.ssbmg.com/

Description

"How can organizations flourish in economic, social and environmental dimensions, and contribute to a new sustainable economy? This question in one form or another is on the mind of many people today. Flourishing enterprises and sustainability can be approached in many ways and from numerous perspectives. In January 2012 the multi-disciplinary Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group (SSBMG) was founded with the objective of providing a focal point for collaboration in applied research on this topic. The SSBMG is an action research knowledge mobilization initiative of the Strategic Innovation Lab in OCAD University's Faculty of Design. The group includes industry practitioners, faculty and graduate students from around the world, including from OCAD University's Strategic Foresight & Innovation program.

We have 5 streams of research/practice being actively undertaken by our members, who list completed works here, document on-going initiatives here, and use other sections of the wiki to enable collaboration on those initiatives. This includes the development of a Toolkit to help Small and Medium Enterprises design better strongly sustainable business models." (http://wiki.ssbmg.com/)

Research

"Our objective is to assist and accelerate the shift of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) at any stage of development (from start-up to long lived) to a strongly sustainable mode of operations; we believe one key approach to achieving this via the design and successful implementation Strongly Sustainable Business Models (creating tri-profit: financial rewards, social benefits and environmental regeneration - doing good to do well) and hence actively sustain "the possibility that human and other life can flourish on this planet forever" (Ehrenfeld, 2000).

Our focus is to use the practices of systemic design thinking to bring about our vision through a focus on enabling Small and Medium Enterprises to design, adopt and execute Strongly Sustainable, Flourishing, Thriving, Vital, Business Models. Since SMEs form 90%+ of all businesses globally, it is vital we enable them with business models that proactively drive enterprise financial viability, social benefit creation and environmental regeneration – doing good to do well.

Our theory of change is based on the huge influence of human enterprises, and SMEs specifically, have on our economic, social and biophysical systems. Hence, we see the adoption of strongly sustainable business models as a vital contribution to humanity proactively embracing our responsibility of planetary steward in the Anthropocene. Enterprises that adopt such business models proactively contribute to “sustaining the possibility for human and other life to flourish on this planet forever” (Ehrenfeld, 2000).

To achieve our vision & mission our research and practice agenda is organized along a number of "streams":

• Human-centric research about how leaders in SMEs actually make decisions and what role, if any, business models play in this context.

• Develop and validate an ontology for strongly sustainable business models and a visual tool for modeling such businesses (the SSBM Canvas)

• Explore advanced methods of impact definition, measurement and valuation of the social and environmental benefits that can support decision making in organizations, particularly in the context of business models.

• Identify and map the processes related to business strategy decisions in SMEs.

• Use design methods to develop a toolkit for SMEs and test the kit with organizations to further improve it and to create case studies.

There is a strong collaboration and cross-pollination between the various research streams expressed in bilateral and multilateral collaborations and exchanges. We welcome members interested in contributing and actively participating in our research activities. Members document their finished research and practice on this wiki here, introduce their current and on-going initiatives here, and collaborate using the remainder of the wiki." (http://wiki.ssbmg.com/home/streams)

Discussion

Goals for Tools to Design Strongly Sustainable Organizations

"simply amassing even the existing knowledge and continuing the relatively small scale experimentation of leaders is clearly not enough to achieve wide-spread flourishing. We need to figure out how to “cross the chasm”. I believe to achieve flourishing at scale we need the knowledge of strong sustainability to be put to widespread use.

One way that has repeatedly been shown throughout human history to scale the adoption of new knowledge is to embed that knowledge in well designed tools – tools which people want to use. In this case we would be embedding the knowledge of strong sustainability in tools which help people design strongly sustainable organizations – organizations which contribute to flourishing.

So if tools are a way of helping people to create large numbers of organizations proactively attempting to produce flourishing, what should be the goals for the design of such tools?" (https://blog.ssbmg.com/2014/01/26/ssbms_defining_the_field/)