This chapter considers environmental sustainability in Industry 5.0 for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Industry 5.0 sees manufacturing environmental footprint reduction as an equally important goal to manufacturing process profitability and productivity. The adoption of circular economy principles such as reuse, repair, recycling, and refurbishing can greatly enhance the business and sustainability goals. Manufacturers need to make significant adjustments to their existing business models for circularity to become a reality. For SMEs, transformation to circularity is even more difficult due to limited resources and immediate business concerns. We introduce and evaluate the barriers and drivers for SME circular business model transformation in a preliminary qualitative analysis. We provide actor perceptions of these barriers and drivers in a variety of industrial settings including consumer electronics, lithium-ion battery, food packaging, and woodcraft industries. Results show that barrier and driver perceptions tend to differ across industries in different regions—specifically the United States and Europe. Significant barriers and drivers to each industry are identified with potential transformational activities recommended.

When the culture and processes of software development companies do not support technical debt management, unintentional technical debt accumulates in the system and becomes excessive. Encouragement, dedicated time, and proper processes can reduce and avoid unintentional debt, and the skill of contextual ambidexterity can be applied by creating an encouraging context that supports technical debt management. However, existing literature discussing which contextual factors are required to achieve this skill is scarce, and practitioners call for approaches to reduce and avoid technical debt. This paper presents a systematic literature review of 48 papers to identify contextual factors for achieving contextual ambidexterity in knowledge-driven contexts. The results reveal seven categories of core and support contextual factors. This paper informs small- and medium-sized software development companies which contextual factors establish an encouraging context, and it theoretically examines the IT managers’ responsibility for technical debt management.

A business model is an essential concept for securing long-term success and competitive advantage, where technologies take on an enabling role. Without the respective technology, the business model becomes unviable. Digital technologies are well known to enable business models, and various definitions of the term digital business models and their characteristics are discussed in the existing literature. However, scholars sometimes use this term interchangeably with the term technology-based business models, although not all technologies are digital in nature. In fact, many different types of technologies other than digital ones exist. A strong theoretical foundation for digital business models is available, while the research on technology-based business models is fragmented and incomplete. This term has been used without further defining its meaning or the definitions provided are too narrow and decisive characteristics are missing. Although authors have used these two terms interchangeably, they cannot be seen as equivalent, and the definitions and characteristics of digital business models cannot be simply transferred to the concept of technology-based ones. Therefore, the absence of a holistic and comprehensive definition of the term technology-based business models in the existing literature represents a significant gap that this research seeks to address. The aim of our study was to examine how business models are based on a particular technology. We use the results of a systematic literature review and semi-structured expert interviews to construct a comprehensive definition for the term technology-based business models, and we identify the major and minor characteristics of both terms. In addition to adding to the business model literature, these findings help practitioners understand technology-based business models in more detail and how technology can enable business models to meet customers’ needs.