René Bohnsack

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Universidade Católica Portuguesa

Sustainable technologies challenge prevailing business practices, especially in industries that depend heavily on the use of fossil fuels. Firms are therefore in need of business models that transform the specific characteristics of sustainable technologies into new ways to create economic value and overcome the barriers that stand in the way of th...

In this article we provide a systematic review of the extensive yet diverse and fragmented literature on digital transformation (DT), with the goal of clarifying boundary conditions to investigate the phenomenon from the perspective of organizational change. On the basis of 279 articles, we provide a multi‐dimensional framework synthesizing what is...

This article ties in directly with recently intensified interest in business models in international business (IB), using the energy transition as empirical context to explore their relevance in firm internationalization. The global energy transition presents a challenge for almost all industries, but some face specific difficulties particularly im...

Proliferating digitalization affects the evolution of business models across contexts and challenges firms’ established innovation trajectories. Prior work on organizational path dependence suggests that firms experience decreasing option spaces over time and ultimately arrive at lock-in situations that prevent them from reacting to changing enviro...

Digital technologies contribute to more sustainable development – but also create unintended consequences. This was an underlying theme throughout all papers in our special issue “Sustainability in the Digital Age”, edited by Christina Bidmon, Jonatan Pinkse and myself. Whether it is social media sharing, using big data, or IoT technologies for sus...

The digital transformation of industrial-age sectors changes product architectures and industry architectures, influencing how value is created and captured in emerging digital business ecosystems. In the industrial era, products were designed around modular architectures and complementary assets, and bottlenecks determined who profits from innovat...

Business models for sustainability (BMfS) enable organizations to create social and environmental value for a wide variety of stakeholders. As BMfS are new for well-established industries, their implementation requires deep organizational change to overcome path dependencies of existing business models. In this article, we present a framework which...

This conceptual paper argues that for sustainable product innovation to make a contribution to addressing sustainability issues, we need to understand not only why consumers adopt sustainable products but also what makes them use these in a sustainable way. To explain how specific product features can change the ways in which consumers engage with...

Disruptive innovations often struggle to enter the mainstream market, especially those that benefit society. Innovative business models can help to make inferior technologies attractive and disrupt existing market linkages. As value propositions are an integral part of business models, they can play a key role in this process. This study explores t...

Whereas research acknowledges the potential of business model innovation (BMI) to destabilize an existing regime, the impact of a socio-technical system in transition on BMI remains under-conceptualized. To advance work in this direction, this study expands the concept of a business model design space (BMDS), which describes the opportunities and c...

The increasing popularity of electric vehicles (EVs) is known to amplify the already present peaks in electricity demand. The possibility to remotely control and influence the charging of many EVs using the Internet of Things (IoT) via an aggregator has been proposed to optimize resource usage, to alleviate peak problems, and to exploit revenues th...

Given that entire industries face sustainability challenges, it is important to understand the dynamics that lead “firms‐in‐an‐industry” to engage in sustainable product innovation. To provide more insight into the question of how innovation activities spread from individual firm action to an industry‐wide engagement, this paper examines the automo...

As companies become more and more digital, growth hacking has emerged as a new way of scaling businesses. Yet, while the term is increasingly fashionable in business, many execu-tives remain confused about the concept. And, even if firms have an idea of what growth hacking is, they may still be puzzled as to how to do it, creating a strategy-execut...

Innovating on business models has been a challenge for many managers, as they are somehow limited to what they already know or have learned. Based on recent literature, patterns are seen as a way to overcome these challenges, as they contribute to extending the manager’s imagination which can contribute to the discovery of new ways of creating and...

In the age of digitalization, incumbent firms are forced to compete with newborn digital ventures in novel spaces. Both digital entrants as well as industrial-age incumbents enter this emerging competition from different starting points: incumbents are known to be restrained by their cognitive and material path dependence to innovate, and new entra...

This chapter describes avenues for future research to develop a “sustainable business model pattern language.” The chapter reflects on how sustainable business model (SBM) patterns can be identified, described, and turned into a design language to support the development of more sustainable organisations. Such organisations solve ecological, social...

The Chinese government has implemented a comprehensive strategy to push low-emission vehicles (LEVs). Local municipalities have played an important role in this transition. Programmes such as the "Ten Cities Thousand Vehicles" (TCTV) created local niches for the development of LEVs in which public and private actors can experiment without market pr...

We examined the entrepreneurial orientation and sustainability orientation, a persistent and conflicting duality, of sustainable entrepreneurs and their evaluation of competing priorities in sustainability decision making. We conducted an exploratory, mixed-method study of 24 sustainable fashion firms and collected data through structured surveys a...

Disruptive technologies tend to underperform on attributes that are considered as key attributes of incumbent technologies and require new value propositions to increase mainstream customer appeal. Yet, how do firms reconfigure their value proposition as a way to overcome the technological inferiority of disruptive technologies? This paper conceptu...

This study takes an institutional perspective on industry creation, which argues that an industry’s maturation relies on a process of building legitimacy and establishing rules for competition. It addresses the institutional evolution process that an industry experiences, in which existing rules for competition are disrupted and replaced by new reg...

Links entrepreneurial orientation to decision making trade offs focused on social, ecological and economic sustainability

Abstract: Energy policies in many countries push for an increase in the generation of wind and solar power. Along these developments, the balance between supply and demand becomes more challenging as the generation of wind and solar power is volatile, and flexibility of supply and demand becomes valuable. As a consequence, companies in the electri...

Energy policies in many countries push for an increase in the generation of wind and solar power. Along these developments, the balance between supply and demand becomes more challenging as the generation of wind and solar power is volatile, and flexibility of supply and demand becomes valuable. As a consequence, companies in the electric power sec...

Energy policies in many countries push for an increase in the generation of wind and solar power. Along these developments, the balance between supply and demand becomes more challenging as the generation of wind and solar power is volatile, and flexibility of supply and demand becomes valuable. As a consequence, companies in the electric power sec...

Combining electric cars with utility services seems to be a natural fit and holds the promise to tackle various mobility as well as electricity challenges at the same time. So far no viable business model for vehicle-to-grid technology has emerged, raising the question which characteristics a vehicle-to-grid business model should have. Drawing on a...

Low-emission vehicle (LEV) technologies have grown in the 1990s, but have since experienced fluctuating interest. Initially, electric vehicles (EVs) were the most promising technology. Most large car firms developed EVs and started bringing them to the market, in limited numbers. Yet, car firms halted their EV engagement around 2001 and focused on...

Combining electric cars with utility services seems to be a natural fit and holds the promise to tackle various mobility as well as electricity challenges at the same time. So far no viable business model for vehicle-to-grid technology has emerged, raising the question which characteristics a vehicle-to-grid business model should have. Drawing on a...

Combining electric cars with utility services seems to be a natural fit and holds the promise to tackle various mobility as well as electricity challenges at the same time. So far no viable business model for vehicle-to-grid technology has emerged, raising the question which characteristics a vehicle-to-grid business model should have. Drawing on a...

In the automotive industry the need to move towards more sustainable trajectories of innovation has received much attention. Car manufacturers have started to develop loweremission alternatives for the internal combustion engine, particularly electric, hybrid and fuel-cell vehicles. They face the challenge, however, of how to make a potentially dis...