Mainstreaming Business Models for Sustainability in Mature Industries: Leveraging Alternative Institutional Logics for Optimal Distinctiveness
研究了成熟产业中可持续商业模式如何被广泛接受和采用，通过对荷兰电力产业的定性分析，发现企业家需结合替代制度逻辑设计商业模式并改变主导逻辑，成功模式作为异常现象加速普及过程。
Addressing global sustainability challenges requires a mainstreaming of business models for sustainability (BMfS) in mature industries. However, the presence of an already dominant mainstream business model in an industry tends to hold back BMfS. This article investigates how new types of BMfS can become generally accepted and widely adopted in an industry. It presents a qualitative study of the mainstreaming of BMfS in the Dutch electricity industry. The findings show that this process depends on entrepreneurs’ capacity to (1) incorporate alternative institutional logics into the design of BMfS to achieve optimal distinctiveness and (2) to directly alter the dominant institutional logic of the industry to make it more conducive to BMfS. Furthermore, successful BMfS act as anomalies that indirectly alter the industry’s dominant institutional logic. Anomalies support a self-reinforcing loop that accelerates the mainstreaming process. We integrate these findings into a dynamic model of the mainstreaming of BMfS.