The shift towards a climate-neutral economy will affect businesses in the upcoming decades. Companies will need to increase their transformation towards environmentally sustainable businesses in the following years, in which digitalization might be a practical enabler to accelerate this transformation. However, as a starting point, companies require knowledge of their current sustainability performance to manage this transition and need a method that provides the necessary information. The use of self-assessment tools is a widely acknowledged method for such processes. Nevertheless, there is a lack of self-assessment tools that integrate sustainability and digitalization perspectives to overcome different organizational barriers. This paper focuses on how managers can be supported in planning their transformations by interlinking sustainability and digitization. Our objective is to enable the managers of companies to assess their current state in terms of corporate environmental sustainability and to explore their policies, information systems, and actions to support their transformation towards sustainable and digital businesses. A self-assessment tool based on a rapid questionnaire is presented after reviewing and synthesizing different approaches, including maturity modeling, sustainability reporting, and digital assessment tools. The self-assessment tool is improved upon evaluation by industry experts and the framework is tested on a case company.

Systems change can help to address sustainability challenges and interventions at deep leverage points of a system can be applied to do so. By studying 9 sustainable entrepreneurial businesses, this paper looked at how entrepreneurial firms used their business to intervene at deep leverage points to facilitate systems change. We then proposed how deep leverage points can be operationalized by developing an approach for sustainable business model innovation and how entrepreneurs can consciously target leverage points when designing their business models to influence sustainable systems change.

Individual firm and ecosystem level efforts are required to meaningfully improve sustainability across the food system. While there has been extensive research on collaboration for sustainability in the food system, these studies focus on working along the supply chain. As the food system is complex with relations and effects spanning across supply chains and industries, another approach is for firms to look beyond their traditional supply chain to tackle sustainability at their ecosystem level. In this regard, there is a need to investigate how firms collaborate with partners to influence sustainability in their ecosystem. In this paper, we present findings of an exploratory study with interviews of 17 firms across the food system that work with partners in their ecosystem for sustainability. We found that informal collaboration among partners is common but occur differently at certain stages of innovation and development and happens even when sharing of benefits are not yet agreed upon. The findings suggest how individual firms can support ecosystem change and how they can work with partners to develop and propagate innovative sustainability solutions in the food system.