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.

In today’s intricate business landscape, characterised by volatility and uncertainty, organisations encounter numerous external challenges. In this context, the concept of liminality offers a unique perspective on organisational transition, fostering environments conducive to reflection and exploration. Liminal spaces, which often correspond to strategy workshops, provide environments for experimentation and innovation, facilitating the co-creation of solutions. While theoretical exploration of liminality is extensive, practical insights on facilitating liminal workshops are lacking. Human-Centred Design (HCD) has proven effective in facilitating organisational change through co-creation practices. Therefore, in this study we propose the hybridisation of HCD co-creation practices and liminal spaces for facilitating organisational change. © 2024 The Authors

Companies sometimes apply circular strategies envisioning an ideal scenario (Bocken et al., 2023; Dembek et al., 2023). While reality is out of control, context dependent, evolutionary (Ostuzzi, 2017). This creates a gap between what has been designed (ideal) and what really happens (reality). This study aims to find blind spots in specific companies’ cases concerning the real product “dynamics”, “after gate”. What information is out of sight, leading to overlooked sustainability impacts? Three companies, designing and/or producing physical products in Flanders have been involved in a two-day design workshop. Researchers observed and analyzed the resulting outcomes of the observative stage of one of these companies to uncover missing information. The method is inspired by the annotated portfolio technique (Sauerwein, Bakker and Balkenende, 2018). This study confirms that companies lack awareness of what happens “after gate”. In this study, we observed a blind spot that product “dynamics” (products gradual change, contextual changes, and changes in user behavior) are not mapped out, while it is in the nature of products to be changing (Ostuzzi, 2017). Not observing the change consequently means overlooking the sustainability impact of these “dynamics”. Future studies should aim at further discovering the blind spots companies might have on the “after gate” and real lives of their products, and therefore of the impacts created. Furter research could investigate how designers can anticipate the change in product, context, and stakeholder within the circular economy, by for example designing open-ended (Ostuzzi, 2017). © 2024 The Authors