Scalability of Sustainable Business Models in Hybrid Organizations

Abstract

Abstract:The dynamics of change in modern business create new mechanisms for company management to determine their pursuit and the achievement of their high performance. This performance maintained over a long period of time becomes a source of ensuring business continuity by companies. An ontological being enabling the adoption of such assumptions is such a business model that has the ability to generate results in every possible market situation and, moreover, it has the features of permanent adaptability. A feature that describes the adaptability of the business model is its scalability. Being a factor ensuring more work and more efficient work with an increasing number of components, scalability can be applied to the concept of business models as the company's ability to maintain similar or higher performance through it. Ensuring the company's performance in the long term helps to build the so-called sustainable business model that often balances the objectives of stakeholders and shareholders, and that is created by the implemented principles of value-based management and corporate social responsibility. This perception of business paves the way for building hybrid organizations that integrate business activities with pro-social ones. The combination of an approach typical of hybrid organizations in designing and implementing sustainable business models pursuant to the scalability criterion seems interesting from the cognitive point of view. Today, hybrid organizations are great spaces for building effective and efficient mechanisms for dialogue between business and society. This requires the appropriate business model. The purpose of the paper is to present the conceptualization and operationalization of scalability of sustainable business models that determine the performance of a hybrid organization in the network environment. The paper presents the original concept of applying scalability in sustainable business models with detailed interpretation. The paper and its findings are based on longitudinal research with participant observation, bibliographic research and the author's own experience in the processes of building and implementing business models in the years [2005][2006][2007][2008][2009][2010][2011][2012][2013][2014][2015]. At the time, the author observed the conceptualization and operationalization of several business models of companies operating in the Polish market.

Managing Sustainable Hybrid Organisations: A Case Study in the Agricultural Sector

“…As Stubbs [24] points out, a stream of literature on sustainable business models has examined hybrid organisations [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. These companies fall between for-profit and social and environmental organisations, which means they consciously align for-profit with non-profit practices, aiming to spread their innovative procedures in order to achieve sustainable objectives.…”

“…In addition to harmonising economic viability and social/environmental mission, scalability is a major challenge for hybrid companies [21,24]. As mentioned above, these organisations tend to reject the assumption that the market needs unlimited economic growth in favour of creating a stable business and market, in an attempt to generate positive change while at the same time guaranteeing their future economic viability.…”

“…The pursuit of social and environmental improvements through their practices, products and services, in parallel with good economic performance, is precisely what defines hybrid organisations [15,16]. Characterised by their sustainable and innovative business models, these organisations have generated a growing body of literature in recent years [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23].…”

Sustainable Business Models: Literature Review of Main Contributions and Themes

“…The next category in Table 8 concerns the various life cycle stages through which every BM goes, from the initial phase through to maturity, similar to the life cycle models proposed in the management literature for products or firms (Jabłoński, 2016;Short, Bocken, Barlow, & Chertow, 2014).Two other themes emerged with lower frequency: first, scalability of BMs (Dobson et al, 2018;Jabłoński, 2016a;Täuscher & Abdelkafi, 2018), which is the distribution of sustainability innovations to bring greater benefits to the environment and society while simultaneously assuring economic sustainability; and second, education, or how to disseminate awareness and information about SBMs through student engagement and the implementation of new university courses (Karlusch, Sachsenhofer & Reinsberger, 2018).…”

Investigating the Links of Interpersonal Trust in Telecommunications Companies

“…This is made possible by the construction of a so-called sustainable business model which maintains an equilibrium between stakeholders' and shareholders' interests. At the same time, these enterprises implement management rules based on value and societal responsibility [32].…”