مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

A growing body of literature on sustainability transitions is concerned with the long term transformation towards sustainability of socio-technical systems (e.g. electricity, transport, water infrastructure) relied upon to satisfy basic human needs (e.g. warmth, nutrition, mobility) (Smith et al., 2010; Markard et al., 2012). In parallel a related strand of research has focused explicitly on business models and sustainable development, which contains a much stronger firm-level focus, examining how the development and implementation of novel business models can create and capture value from sustainable innovations (Boons and LüdekeFreund, 2013). There has in recent years been a growing interest in how these two strands of work might be synthesized to offer insights into how business model innovation could act as a catalyst for system-wide sustainability transitions (Loorbach et al., 2010; Boons and Lüdeke-Freund, 2013; Wells, 2013a; Foxon et al., 2015; Hannon et al., 2013; Lüdeke-Freund, 2013). Situating business models in a broader socio-technical system context and analyzing “the relationships between sustainability. . ., government policy ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: Ronan.Bolton@ed.ac.uk (R. Bolton), matthew.hannon@strath.ac.uk (M. Hannon). and regulation, and innovative business models”, Wells argues, presents: “an important future research agenda” (Wells, 2013b: p. 238).

This paper aims to further advance these efforts by drawing on systems theories in the business model and socio-technical literatures to examine how novel energy business models have been utilised to deploy sustainable technologies. Specifically it examines the ways in which the Energy Services Company (ESCo) model has been used by Local Authorities to develop combined heat and power with district heating (CHP/DH) systems in the UK. The ESCo model is innovative in the sense that it is centered on the efficient provision of energy services as opposed to units of delivered energy, as per the underpinning logic of the incumbent utility model of energy supply (Richter, 2012). Similarly, decentralised CHP/DH systems differ from the incumbent nationwide centralised electricity and gas infrastructure in the sense that smaller scale CHP plants are located close to centres of demand, creating the opportunity to capture waste heat from the thermal generation process and distribute it locally via a network of distribution pipes. The move to a localised CHP/DH system represents a transformation of the current configuration of the socio-technical system, which the novel ESCo model has been used to govern and facilitate.

It has been argued elsewhere that system-wide change rather than the implementation of individual technologies, institutions or business models will be necessary to realise a sustainability transition (Geels, 2004; Bolton and Foxon, 2015). There are however different conceptualisations of ‘systems’ in the business model and socio-technical literatures. From an analytical perspective the novelty of the paper lies in the deployment of three different systems perspectives from across these two literatures to make sense of the relationship between business model innovation and sociotechnical change. From the business model literature we draw from Zott and Amit’s ‘activity system’ approach (Zott and Amit, 2010) which views a business model as “. . .a set of interdependent organisational activities” (p. 217), and from the socio-technical systems literature we draw from both Hughes’ large technical systems (LTS) approach (Hughes, 1983) and the multi-level perspective (MLP) (Smith et al., 2010).