True value co-creation initiatives on Business Model Innovation for Sustainability (BMIfS) are essential for universities and Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) for addressing the challenges created by the wicked problem of sustainability. Currently, however, such inter-organizational collaboration initiatives are understudied. This article, which examines two inter-organizational collaboration initiatives involving two universities and two SMEs that were engaged in true value co-creation in BMIfS, makes a two-fold contribution. The article unravels the opportunities and risks associated with two true value co-creation BMIfS initiatives (between university students and SME managers) and proposes a set of key principles underpinning the success of inter-organizational collaboration for true value co-creation in BMIfS. © 2026 The Author(s)

Purpose: The aim of this study is to provide a holistic understanding of how financial organisations can develop human-centred design (HCD) capability. Design/methodology/approach: We applied a hybrid research design. We first compiled a snowballing review of the literature to explore the key perspectives on developing HCD capability in organisations. Then, to validate and adapt our findings to the specific characteristics of financial organisations, we applied an expert elicitation process. Twelve expert designers leading HCD practices in the financial sector evaluated and built upon our findings to contribute to 10 managerial propositions aimed at helping financial organisations develop HCD capability. Findings: Our study provides an integrative view of the theoretical base and practical recommendations on how to develop HCD capability in financial organisations. The study suggests formulas for safe HCD experimentation, sustained investment for learning and mechanisms for continuous improvement and evaluation. Furthermore, our research stresses the importance of end-to-end involvement of HCD across the financial service lifecycle. Ultimately, we argue that HCD capability for effective development in financial organisations depends on legitimate leaders equipped with change management skills who can connect HCD to strategic decision-making in finance. Originality/value: The article proposes a comprehensive and research-backed proposal for developing HCD capability in financial organisations. Its value stems from providing practical guidance, bridging literature theory with real-world application in finance.

Innovation ecosystems have mainly been studied from a focal actor perspective, while complementors have been rarely in focus, especially how a complementor can become a focal complementor, inducing and supporting the value co-creation of other complementors. This paper explains how a peripheral complementor characterized by scarce resources and poorly aligned capabilities, such as an entrant to a mature innovation ecosystem, can overcome these obstacles through co-creation with other complementors and the ecosystem’s focal actor. Through a qualitative case study approach, we show how the product-centric company, the automotive firm Polestar, entered a mature innovation ecosystem centered on the digital platform Android Automotive OS, thereby enhancing Polestar’s onboard app development during the period 2018-2022. Using a thematic analysis based on an ecosystem functions framework, the paper shows and explains how a complementor can become a focal complementor by creating and enabling a sub-ecosystem within a mature innovation ecosystem, characterized by aligning complementors to co-create value while exploiting the focal actor’s resources. The paper explains how the three mechanisms of strategic focus, agile practices, and capability building align the focal complementor with complementors and the focal actor, allowing it to maintain internal and external legitimacy and mobilize resources. © 2026 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

In today’s turbulent world and a future difficult to anticipate, organizations need to redefine their business logic towards sustainability. Thus, the need for future-making practices is more important than ever. This paper explores speculative storytelling as such a future-making practice and as an instrument for creating an awareness of value proposition for sustainability design. The approach is interdisciplinary building on business model innovation and literary studies. The study uses data provided by short stories composed by non-customer stakeholders to be utilized in the initial stages of designing a value proposition for sustainability. The data was analyzed according to a benefit and sacrifice model capturing the emotional, social and functional values. The data was also studied through a chronotopic lens. The results show that the suggested approach is suitable for the production of narratives to be used as objects for learning and change within the context of value propositions for sustainability. © 2025 The Author(s).

The dominant economic, profit-normative, and business-centered narrative has failed to empower diverse community groups to pluralistically participate fully in local rural life in Canada. This highlights the need for new approaches to community engagement, safety and trust. One such approach that can be used to envision alternative ways of co-creating value through citizen engagement is the use of serious games and collaborative game making workshops as a safe and risk-free innovation thirdspace. In this paper, we present work on how a game-making methodology organically emerged through the reflective facilitation of a series of iterative sessions in different domains aimed at helping rural community intermediary organizations prototype and co-create mission driven value alongside diverse social and culture groups. This paper details the process and initial insights from how rural community nonprofit and public institutional intermediaries can unlock their regional social and political capital, using game making approaches to better address current challenges faced by the marginalized groups they service. Through outputs and insights from this work, the goal is to help develop participatory tools for community-driven innovations that enable flourishing in rural communities in Canada. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025

Industrial production contributes significantly to ecological sustainability challenges. One guiding approach to address these challenges is the circular economy. Slowing down resource flows is one of the main strategies of the circular economy.  This involves extending the lifespan of products within and across multiple life cycles and increasing their utilization intensity. Various tools have been developed to support companies in adopting circular economy practices.  This study examines how these tools facilitate designing for product longevity. Specifically, the study analyzes 10 tools — five recent tools identified in academic literature and five first emerging through internet scraping.  These tools are annotated and coded to reveal qualitative insights regarding the level of longevity they address (theoretical and methodological insights) and how these tools help handle longevity-related aspects  (practical and applied insights).  The findings highlight how these tools contribute to extending product lifespans and identify the extent to which they could support slowing down resource flows.

Purpose: Many startups face the complex anticipation of offering value sustainably over the long term yet must test market engagement to evaluate an economically viable business model in the near term. This study aims to capture the usefulness of a business model innovation method (Flourishing Startup Method) aligned with sustainability-as-flourishing thinking as perceived by entrepreneurs during the early stages of enterprise development. 

Design/Methodology/Approach: Through action research, the utility of the approach was evaluated through multiple applications across two events with a total of 64 entrepreneurs taking place 2017-2018. 

Findings: The research revealed insights related to the reaction that Flourishing Startup Method and its facilitation including the intention to use beyond the events, their perceived learning utility, as well as the overall perceived utility in terms of usefulness and ease of use. The study also showed that to get the full advantages of all those four aspects of the Flourishing Startup Method, entrepreneurs must have more time and facilitated opportunities to develop a minimum level of proficiency in a set of entrepreneurial competencies to address the business model for sustainability-as-flourishing capability gap.

Originality/Value: This research contributes to understanding the process of business model innovation with novel and impactful business models towards sustainability-as-flourishing models and offers one of few empirical investigations on aspects of a business model innovation method to identify its utility during the early stages of their startup development. 

Purpose: Many startups face the complex anticipation of offering value sustainably over the long term yet must test market engagement to evaluate an economically viable business model in the near term. This study aims to capture the usefulness of a business model innovation method (Flourishing Startup Method) aligned with sustainability-as-flourishing thinking as perceived by entrepreneurs during the early stages of enterprise development. 

Design/Methodology/Approach: Through action research, the utility of the approach was evaluated through multiple applications across two events with a total of 64 entrepreneurs taking place 2017-2018. 

Findings: The research revealed insights related to the reaction that Flourishing Startup Method and its facilitation including the intention to use beyond the events, their perceived learning utility, as well as the overall perceived utility in terms of usefulness and ease of use. The study also showed that to get the full advantages of all those four aspects of the Flourishing Startup Method, entrepreneurs must have more time and facilitated opportunities to develop a minimum level of proficiency in a set of entrepreneurial competencies to address the business model for sustainability-as-flourishing capability gap.

Originality/Value: This research contributes to understanding the process of business model innovation with novel and impactful business models towards sustainability-as-flourishing models and offers one of few empirical investigations on aspects of a business model innovation method to identify its utility during the early stages of their startup development.

Startups, of all types and at varying stages of development, across industries and geographic locations, are today attempting to adapt their business logic and practices to reflect the need for integrated social, environmental, and economic sustainability (Niessen et al., 2024; Zollo et al., 2013). Entrepreneurs and investors are recognizing that if their business models continue to prioritize near-term profitability goals, the likelihood of unintended negative social, environmental, and economic consequences increases (Epstein and Yuthas, 2017). However, focusing beyond near-term profitability may increase the uncertainty for startups as they face significant product and market risks (Freeman and Engel, 2007). Business model innovation along with associated tools (e.g., business model canvas) and methods (e.g., lean startup) provide a means for decision-makers to ideate, experiment and evaluate the fitness of various business model designs (Niessen et al., 2024; Zott & Amit, 2024). This is especially so for business model designs that entail sustainability practices and values beyond reducing their negative impact towards positive contribution, aka positive handprint, regeneration and strong sustainability (Bocken and Snihur, 2020; Bugg-Levine and Emerson, 2011; Das & Bocken, 2024; Laszlo et al., 2012; Seebode et al., 2012). Strong sustainability puts the emphasis on the complementarity and non substitution between economy and nature (Nilsen, 2010) and recognizes the biophysical limits for economic activity within the planetary boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009).

Upward and Jones (2016) are introducing an ontology for strongly sustainable business models which puts in the center on flourishing. Sustainability-as-flourishing expresses a normative goal beyond doing less harm to create a net positive impact (Laszlo et al., 2012). As Ehrenfeld (2020) states, the concept and the word flourishing imply that humans and humanity reach the highest potential in a meaningful way over time. Bocken and Short (2021) place the sustainability-as-flourishing on the top of the hierarchy as the most preferred and impactful alternative business models. In order to enable early-stage startups to align with sustainability-as-flourishing thinking, the role of tools and methods for business model innovation is vital (Breuer et al., 2018). Furthermore, within the ontology for strongly sustainable business models, the concept of value is revisited with emphasis on co-creation amongst all stakeholders of the organization (Upward & Jones, 2016).

A plethora of methods and tools to support business model innovation entailing sustainability practices have emerged in the recent years, yet as Niessen et al. (2024) state, those remain underutilized and not empirically tested to determine their usefulness and fit with the needs and expectations of the intended users to support and speed up the transition towards strong sustainability. Furthermore, Snihur and Zott (2019) observe once business models are established, they are challenging to change and stay stable during long periods. Thus, the early stages of startup development, when business model choices are made, are critical to establishing long-term goals (such as strong sustainability) and possibilities for near-term viability in current conditions. Even more, as Carle and Rayana (2024: 148) conclude “the integration of the triple bottom line … already in idea generation… in the entrepreneurial process has a major effect on startups” long-term sustainability work (i.e., impact assessment practices). Additionally, the focus on startups is important as they are seen to have a key role in addressing grand challenges (European Commission, 2013).

Thus, the aim of this paper is to explore how the application of flourishing business approaches in the early stages of startup development has influenced the way entrepreneurs perceive and work with a value co-creation process over time.

We explore this aim by a qualitative interview study with focus on one such approach - the Flourishing Startup Method (FSM). FSM was developed and described by Hogeboom and Upward (2021), has the aspiration to enable startups to proactively contribute to creating the conditions for the possibility of sustainability-as-flourishing. The FSM may be described as a systemic-design enhancement of the Lean Startup Approach for business model experimentation. It aims to provide a systems thinking, integrated experimental, iterative learning procedure for entrepreneurs to follow to realize their startups purposes in moving from a core focus being profit-making to sustainability-as-flourishing – a socially, environmentally, and economically integrated over time.

In this paper, we focus on two learning events with a total of 64 participants, which took place in Canada 2017-2018. We take 2017-2018 as a baseline and will interview the participants during spring 2025 to follow up how the training in applying the FSM to their business idea and startup influenced their continued value co-creation process over time. We will compare those insights with the elicited feedback on the utility of the FSM and its facilitation collected directly after each event (2017-2018). In that way, we can create an understanding about how the application of flourishing business approaches (a.k.a FSM) in the early stages of startup development has influenced the way entrepreneurs perceive and work with value co-creation process over time.

This research contributes to the academic discourse on understanding business model innovation for novel and impactful business models beyond “weak” sustainability towards sustainability-as-flourishing (Bocken and Snihur, 2020; Bocken and Short, 2021; Niessen et al., 2024). It complements and extends this theoretical discussion by performing, to our knowledge, the first longitudinal empirical investigation on aspects of a business model innovation approach (in our case, FSM) and identifying how it has influenced the way earlystage entrepreneurs perceive and work with value co-creation process over time. (e.g., Bocken and Snihur, 2020; Bocken et al., 2016; Snihur and Zott, 2019; Upward and Davies, 2019; Weissbrod and Bocken, 2017).