Conceptual Ecosystems to Support the Development of Sustainable Business Models for a Capital Equipment Manufacturer

Improving sustainability concerns many stakeholders: customers, shareholders, employees, and regulators. The manufacturing industry is a significant factor as production continually depletes finite resources. Without a shift to more sustainable business models (i.e. those based on the triple bottom line), there is a risk of continued depletion of resources. A common finding from prior work is the need to act within an ecosystem approach to support the development of a circular economy that considers the multiple interactions and dynamic recombination of resources that lead to value co-creation. This paper investigates the interplay of ecosystem actors and builds conceptual habitats to improve sustainability. It considers the strategic meso and macro levels of the ecosystem to provide detailed insights into the behaviors and motivations of different actors. Critical bilateral and multilateral interdependences among the ecosystem actors are highlighted. The presence of digitalization provides the necessary institutional arrangements for interactions between diverse actors. This builds upon the work of West et al. (Practices and tools for servitization. Springer, pp. 363–385, 2018), by creating multiple conceptual future state ecosystems, identifying gaps within the ecosystems, and providing a description of the actors. The study suggests that an extended model is considered for developing and operationalizing sustainability-based business models for capital equipment. The limitations of this study reveal the requirement to validate and cross-check the suggestions in a real case example with a broader scope for comprehensive qualitative and quantitative data collection.