طراحی مدل کسب و کار در کارآفرینی پایدار: روشن کردن منطق تجاری کسب و کارهای ترکیبی Business model design in sustainable entrepreneurship: Illuminating the commercial logic of hybrid businesses

1. Introduction In recent years, a new stream of entrepreneurial activities and corresponding research have received increasing attention: businesses and entrepreneurs that pursue social and/or ecological goals while being guided by a distinct business mindset and some form of commercial orientation (e.g., see Battilana and Lee, 2014; Doherty et al., 2014). Such endeavors are often discussed with terms such as hybrid businesses, sustainable entrepreneurship or social enterprises. A very recent study by Todeschini et al. (2017) describes this phenomenon as born-sustainable business models, which follow shared values and principles of sustainability built upon collaboration and innovation. Such entrepreneurs and their respective ventures are said to be of significant practical, political, and academic interest (Haigh and Hoffman, 2012; Mair and Martí, 2006). One aspect that has attracted significant attention in research on hybrid and sustainable businesses is the entrepreneur’s motivation (Cohen and Winn, 2007; Hahn and Ince, 2016; Yitshaki and Kropp, 2015). Beyond this microperspective, there is high demand to develop a better understanding of “the distinctive nature of the mission, processes, and resources leveraged” (Dacin et al., 2010, p. 53). This understanding is especially relevant in the sustainable and hybrid business context, where business approaches reside somewhere between nonprofits and traditional companies (Battilana et al., 2012) to align social or ecological goals with economic ones (Zahra et al., 2009). Recently, the business model peculiarities of such sustainabilityoriented organizations have become the focus of academic research (see for an overview, e.g., Bocken et al., 2014; Schaltegger et al., 2016). Other than pure nonprofit organizations or charities, hybrid businesses often do not rely on donations or similar sources of income to pursue their nonfinancial goals; thus, hybrid businesses regularly seem to focus on innovative approaches to achieve the companies’ mission (Murphy and Coombes, 2009; Wilson and Post, 2013). Specifically, hybrid businesses implement a business model following a commercial logic as a prerequisite for achieving sustainability for themselves and to contribute to a more sustainable society. However, little is known about the peculiarities of hybrid or sustainable business models with regard to their ability to successfully operate on commercial markets as a prerequisite of achieving social/ecological goals and research has only recently begun to dig deeper into issues of business models in this domain (see again, e.g., Bocken et al., 2014; Schaltegger et al., 2016).