The management of offshore platforms at the end of their production phase is a complex issue for technological, socioeconomic, ecological and safety reasons. The decommissioning or reconversion of offshore platforms in the context of a circular economy (CE) will lead to new knowledge acquisition, changing values and changing behaviours towards sustainability consistent with the 'new' business objectives. Multiuse platforms at sea (MUPSs) represent an interesting solution for development of marine infrastructures, including areas in which to start and develop various creative economic activities that are in harmony with the needs of environmental protection including renewable energy, sea shellfish farming, decarbonisation plants, tourism, and recreation. Particularly, the research activity focused on a deep literature review of offshore platform decommissioning and sustainable business model (SBM) in a CE context. This allowed us to access the sustainable business model canvas (SBMC), a conceptual tool that represents a holistic view of the different managerial multiuse options and their social and environmental impacts. Besides, to test the SBMC, we adopt an empirical analysis by semi-structured questionnaires given to a sample of stakeholders in the decommissioning industry. The methodology was enriched by interviews with key informants to better investigate the business ecosystem and the feasibility of decommissioning applied to the case of an Italian offshore platform located in the Adriatic Sea. This article aims to contribute to supporting SBMs development following a holistic approach in relationship with all stakeholders and propose a multi-criteria decision-making analysis for evaluating and comparing alternative decommissioning options.

The growing complexity of environmental challenges has progressively led to the emergence of Sustainable Business Models (SBMs) able to embed economic, environmental, and social flows in a unified value network. All sectors are demanding innovative and sustainable solutions, including the oil and gas industry, which aims to address the issues about the decommissioning of offshore platforms. However, although the relevant literature highlighted the potentialities related to a multi-reuse of these structures, the effect of Sustainable Decommissioning (SD) on macro-environmental factors is still an open question. Based on these considerations, this study follows a Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental (PESTLE) analysis according to semi-structured interviews conducted with oil and gas key informants and stakeholders in the Italian context. The results of the analysis can provide a novel thinking for addressing the challenges related to a sustainable decommissioning of offshore platforms and shed light on the importance of synergistic efforts by local entrepreneurship and institutional arrangements to combine economic and environmental sustainability with social needs. This paper can contribute to the emerging field of sustainable business models related to the decommissioning of offshore platforms and suggests avenues for future research.

Recently, some critical events (e.g., the economic decline, the growing socio-ecologic burden, even more demanding customers, etc.) have led several companies to re-think their “shoring” decisions. Therefore, many of them decided to reshore manufacturing or to bring back home production activities previously offshored. This phenomenon represents one of the current imperatives for research. In fact, the location where manufacturing takes place has a massive influence on the sustainability of firms on a local and global level. Therefore, to better understand what makes reshoring strategies sustainable as well as to identify the drivers that can boost it, further research is still needed. The explorative nature of this paper recognizes some motivations or drivers for making reshoring strategies sustainable. To this end, a structured and narrative literature review has been conducted to grasp and describe the main motivations and implementation characteristics that can make reshoring decisions sustainable. The achieved results better define reshoring and the influence that some drivers, especially digital innovation, can play on the related strategies and on their sustainability. In doing so, this work is one of the first contributions that jointly approaches reshoring, sustainability, and digital innovation.

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Studies on the legitimacy challenges faced by hi-tech start-ups are still scarce, leaving room for research, and policymaking debate. Legitimacy issues may become difficult to face for hi-tech firms in comparison with\ud other start-ups, because they work in an extreme environment where the technological challenges are at the edge of the scientific possibility. The paper proposes a conceptual model to grasp the relevance of three\ud legitimacy drivers of the hi-tech start-ups for investment decisions. We investigated the ability of 30 hi-tech start-up firms to obtain financial resources from the US investors, employing a set-theoretic approach\ud and carried out fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. Our findings clarify that the funding decisions of US investors are driven by the location of headquarter and R&D of hi-tech start-ups and by the\ud educational experience of the founders. Our study has significant theoretical, practical, and policymaking implications