This paper aims to investigate how stakeholder groups engaged by the company contribute to the value flow of business models for sustainability. The research aims to expand the knowledge on business models for sustainability by highlighting the most important contributions of stakeholders that are relevant from a value flow and sustainable development perspective. The research methodology is a multiple case study in five Italian B corporations. The paper contribution is a stakeholder value flow model of business models for sustainability that categorizes the stakeholders engaged in the specific value flow dimension, namely, value intention, value proposition, value creation, value delivery and value capture. The stakeholder value flow model can facilitate a systematic and deeper analysis of stakeholder contributions to the company business model. Moreover, the stakeholder value flow model can be used to map from the company perspective the most significant relationships and to facilitate the stakeholder engagement towards sustainable development.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the context of open innovation offered by accelerators can affect the successful growth of start-ups. The authors explore accelerators practices and tools in sustaining start-ups and increasing survival probability in their innovation process, with the aim of addressing the following research question: how can start-ups benefit from participation in an accelerator programme from an open innovation perspective?Design/methodology/approach: A review of the literature on start-up successes and failures and on major practices in the open innovation paradigm was carried out, delineating them in the context of accelerators. Given the absence of literature on accelerator practices for supporting start-ups, and aiming at a comprehensive understanding of how the open environment within the accelerator influences a start-up’s survival (or even success) by mitigating the probability of failure, the authors conducted an exploratory case study in an English accelerator.Findings: The open innovation practices mediated by an accelerator and the ones that are not covered, but that can benefit a start-up’s survival, are shown. On the one hand, main effective practices, such as dyadic co-creation with accelerator network partners and crowdsourcing, are revealed to address mostly the lack of, or wrong direction in, product, marketing and relative managerial abilities, which are not usually owned by a start-up due to its “newness”. On the other hand, some causes of failures, such as the intrinsic characteristics of founder teams, do not seem to be addressed by an open approach and neither does participation in an accelerator programme.Originality/value: This paper is the first to study and link the literature on accelerators, start-ups and open innovation.

Disruptions and unexpected turbulences characterize the contemporary service industry and pose greater criticalities to organizations that have concerns about both their survival and their business sustainability. The answer to this challenge is to design an organizational system aimed at enhancing so-called organizational resilience. The aim of this work is to present and test an assessment methodology based on a framework that links key static and dynamic characteristics of firms as resilient systems and relates these characteristics with service quality preservation after disruptions. The framework adopts a set of indicators, namely resilience dimensions, to comprehend the real effects of resilience characteristics with service quality dimensions. Through the analysis of a real case, we provided evidence of how the model can be applied in a backward perspective to understand fault modes of specific events. Results show how inadequacies in terms of resilience characteristics determine losses of service quality, and also how the model can be used as a predictive tool to determine in which area companies should intervene in order to improve resilience and service quality.

Despite the high number of active small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in all sectors, current studies have barely developed investigations on the sustainability of their business models so far. The aim of this study was thus to bridge the gap between sustainable business models of SMEs in the service industry, to uncover the challenges that SMEs face when seeking business model reconfiguration toward sustainability. More specifically, the empirical investigation adopted a case study research design in the context of yacht tourism, as one business form among many within the tourism industry and thus within the broader category of the service industry. Interviews were conducted with seven European SMEs, whose business models were analyzed through the lens of the triple bottom line and sustainability challenges in their business models. The results display a varied typology of case studies, where business model components reveal diverse expressions of facing sustainability challenges. The work discusses reported findings with a cross-case comparison among detected business models and outlines a list of propositions for sustainable business models of SMEs. The paper contributes in continuing the discourse on sustainable business models, adopting the perspective of the challenges for SMEs and offers food for thought for managers of SMEs in comparing their own business with the identified business model types.