The Business Model of Enough: Value Creation for Sufficiency-Oriented Businesses

We live in an era of unsustainability. Our political-economic systems are producing massive economic wealth on the back of large-scale ecological degradation. Businesses and their business models are important economic value creators and drivers of innovation in any political-economic framework. The challenge to transform society, and thus our political economy, towards sustainability cannot be sufficiently conceptualized without charting the transformation potentials, possibilities and barriers of businesses and their business models. In this chapter we conceptualize a generic business model for a transition towards a sustainable economy and society as an ideal-type by (a) focusing on sufficiency in order to highlight a more radical perspective on sustainability transformations in line with the notion of strong sustainability, and its implications for changing business models and the environment of business, as well as (b) undertaking a reconstruction of the business model concept from the viewpoint of social practice theory, which will give us a much clearer theoretical framework to infer connections between business and consumer practices. We show how such a “Business Model of Enough” can constitute the core for communities of sufficiency practice, thus enabling institutional change within the political-economic background of business, and we discuss which role sufficiency-based business models and consumers play in transition pathways, for example, by introducing and supporting boundary spanning practices and including the perspective of fundamental transformations in everyday consumer practices.