Sustainable business models: Researchers as design thinkers for problem-driven research

In this article, which has an exploratory, conceptual nature, we discuss the challenges for sustainable business model (SBM) practitioners to include a broader range of stakeholders in developing value-creation logic. This is of relevance as it is not clear how the process of enrolling stakeholders to create value unfolds for SBMs. We argue that researchers should be included as key stakeholders and propose using design thinking as an approach for engagement to co-create sustainable business solutions. By incorporating design thinking, researchers and practitioners can collaborate on addressing sustainable problems in their business model to improve mutual understanding about the problem-solution evolution. Including researchers also helps contextualize and align sustainable business model research to design practical testing of solutions. We illustrate this with a model representing the cognitive process of co-creation between researchers and practitioners in SBM design.