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Journal of Cleaner Production

Discourses advocating a focus on green technologies that promote ecological sustainability are changing the business environment significantly. Despite its contribution to transforming contemporary business practices in an ecologically sustainable manner, there is not enough information on the various types of green technologies and their applications. Therefore, it is essential to identify and classify business models that focus on green technologies, in order to promote the creation and establishment of these technologies. Although the literature on green technology business models has gained increasing attention during the past decade, the multidisciplinary research on this growing phenomenon is still nascent and fragmented. Particularly, there is no overarching green technology business model framework that integrates the existing approaches and provides an understanding of their practical implications and future research prospects. Here, we present the first study to address this gap by incorporating the three pillars – the ecological environment, technology, and entrepreneurship. This study proposes a novel typology of green technology business models by outlining twelve distinctive business model archetypes based on two relevant concepts, namely, the sustainable business model archetypes and technological entrepreneurship activities. This framework is underpinned and illustrated by a variety of relevant green technology solutions that the authors have identified through a systematic review of existing, empirically grounded literature on the subject. The authors believe that this framework would be useful for future research on policy making based on cleaner production.

Green entrepreneurship and business models: Deriving green technology business model archetypes