Business models and sustainable firms: a focus on B Corps in Italy

An increasing number of companies are becoming aware of the need to combine economic goals with the achievement of social and environmental goals (Porter and Kramer, 2006). Research on sustainability in the business domain highlights the opportunities of integrating profit - within a shareholder perspective - with a more open approach, focused on the stakeholder view (Buysse and Verbeke, 2003). In particular, sustainability contribute to gain a competitive advantage (Orsato, 2006), where firms can benefit from an explicit strategic orientation that includes environmental and social objectives. Studies on the Triple Bottom Line (Elkington, 1997) pointed out the advantages - but also the challenges - in combining multiple strategic goals. This strategic path can be enabled through business model innovation, whereby value production and distribution are characterized by distinctive features (Geissdoerfer et al., 2018). Growing literature on business model innovation connected to sustainability (Bocken et al., 2014; Bocken and Geradts, 2020) shows the variety of business models that might be adopted as well as the different drivers of value creation and value appropriation (Evans et al., 2017). Sustainable-oriented firms may develop business model innovations in order to achieve sustainability, putting different emphasis on the environmental and social perspectives, thus leading to different performance results (Ritala et al., 2018). Leveraging hybrid organizational forms (Doherty et al., 2014), companies change their strategies by transforming their internal processes and products based on a sustainability perspective. Hybrid organizations emerge (Haigh and Hoffman, 2012) as new organizational forms that take into account the variety of goals and domains of actions with respect to traditional organizations. Such organizations include social and environmental changes as objectives, within a framework of constant interaction with stakeholders as well as with the market, competitors, and industry institutions. It is specifically because of this combination of purposes that those firms are competing differently from wellestablished businesses, dealing also with the consequences of managing this apparent paradox of corporate sustainability (Hahn et al., 2017). In this scenario, B Corps are emerging (Stubbs, 2017) - a movement originated in the United States, then spread internationally - which represent business models formalizing sustainability investments through voluntary certification processes, thus increasing visibility to social entrepreneurship. As hybrid organizations, these firms have been recognized by some scholars as having a role of public nature, since their activities are geared to the achievement of goals that go beyond mere entrepreneurial interests (Vaughan and Arsneault, 2018). In the European context, Italy is the second country after the United Kingdom in terms of number of B Corp enterprises, consistently with entrepreneurial dynamics that have shown - especially in the small business realm - the attention towards social and territorial context. Past studies show that cohesive Italian companies are better able to face changes in competitive scenario, thanks to a strong focus on their internal (employees) and external (local community) social context. There is a new geography of value in which the different forms of organization between profit and non-profit are directed at producing shared value (Sturabotti, Venturi, 2016). It appears to be relevant in research, to pursue a better understanding of how companies get started on this journey, the transformations it entails at strategic level, and the impacts at the organizational and networking ones, as well as the role of human resources. An increasing number of firms strives to simultaneously achieve economic, social and environmental objectives (Triple Bottom Line) (Elkington, 2013). Companies decide to craft their strategies so as to transform environmental and social constraints into new sources of competitive advantage, thus improving their market reputation and transforming their offer and business models, as well as their cost structure.