A Novel Pythogorean Fuzzy-SWARA-CRITIC-COPRAS Method for Evaluating the Barriers to Developing Business Model Innovation for Sustainability

Introduction

Most companies across all industries are concerned about sustainability since being sustainable has a significant effect on remaining profitable and helps companies deal with many problems threatening our society and environment (Khan et al., 2016, Manolis and Manoli, 2021). Companies should also reconfigure their activities to produce new products and services, through innovation is not only about new products and services. In other words, innovation occurs when companies change their activities to create, deliver and capture value through their business models (BMs)(Jørgensen and Pedersen, 2018). Geissdoerfer et al. (2018) stated that the business models represent value proposition, value creation and delivery, and value capture elements and their relationship within an organization. Moreover, considering sustainability and innovation, companies should identify the uncaptured value within their present business model and then try to create value opportunity based on this new understanding to reach a new business model with higher sustainable value, namely sustainable business model innovation (SBMI)(Yang et al., 2017). Sustainable business model innovation adapts a business model to tackle problematic situations in a company and its environment to promote sustainable process, product, or service innovations (Björkdahl and Holmén, 2013). According to Schaltegger et al. (2016), SBMI refers to creating an entirely new or modified business model to help develop and integrate competitive solutions by creating positive external effects and reducing negative impacts on society and the environment.

Sustainable business model innovation has recently become an exciting research string motivating many scholars to investigate various aspects of SBMI. Jørgensen and Pedersen (2018), for example, have proposed a novel model, namely RESTART, to aid managers to rethink, reinvent, and reorganize the paths to create, deliver, and capture value via their business models. RESTART is an acronym of seven letters, including “RE,” “STA,” and “RT.” The first part stands for “Redesign and experimentation,” and the latter stands for “Service-Logic, the circular economy, and alliances,” and the last one stands for “Results and Three dimensionalities.” Also, Shakeel et al. (2020) researched the anatomy of sustainable business model innovation. To this end, the reviewed 61 papers in this field so that the results indicated that SBMI components are (1) Sustainable Value Propositions Innovation (SVPI), (2) Sustainable Value Creation & Delivery (SVC&DI), (3) Sustainable Value Capture Innovation (SVCI). The first component is related to the relationship between the organizations and their customers. However, managers and strategists need to ensure whether their business model leads their organization toward sustainability and whether the proposed SBMI framework is practical. The scarcity of empirical assessment of SBMI barriers has arisen complexity in its implementation due to the uncertainty of the outcomes and various factors that might affect the efficacy of the SBMI; therefore, These issues and challenges make organizations reluctant to adopt SBMI (Breuer et al., 2018). Evaluating companies’ SBMI concerning the implementation barriers is considered a multicriteria decision-making problem characterized by uncertainty due to the incomplete information and subjectivity existing in the decision-making process. Nevertheless, to the best of the author’s knowledge and according to the preliminary literature review, there is a lack of studies in which an MCDM method is applied to evaluate barriers to SBMI and evaluate the companies concerning the identified barriers and deal with the mentioned uncertainty. To this end, the present study aims to propose and apply a novel Pythagorean fuzzy-SWARA-CRITIC-COPRAS method to evaluate the barriers to sustainable business model innovation.