Business failure is an important issue for companies in the 21st century, and green business is of global concern. Therefore, it is of vital importance to reveal the critical factors that could lead to green business failure. Nevertheless, existing research has not fully addressed this yet. This study adopts the company life cycle theory to identify such critical factors. The Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method is applied to convert the expert opinion into quantifiable data, and grey relational analysis is used to take the imprecise information into account in order to improve the validity of the results. Research frameworks constructed from company life cycle is able to reflect the critical factors that lead to green business failure at different development phases. Meanwhile, the adoption of Grey DEMATEL improves the accuracy of assessment, and the result of assessment provides feasible and practical suggestions for decision-making.

Introduction

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the global economy has experienced not only unparalleled changes, but also unprecedented challenges. Especially with growing societal attention on environmental sustainability, companies are realizing that they should take some actions to meet not just economic but also social and environmental needs. Green business refers to meeting the needs of customers without causing environmental and social problems, is an important way to realise sustainable business (Kanchan, Kumar, & Gupta, 2015). Green business provides an opportunity for companies to respond to the changes and strengthens the sustainable competitive advantage. So the companies can gain a favourable position in the market. Therefore, more and more companies run green businesses. While implementing green business, the organisation needs to manage many internal and external risk factors or difficulties, be they foreseeable or not (Su, Shih, & Hsu, 2014).