Business Models Innovation in the Realm of Grand Challenges: Empowering It Through Emerging Technologies

Amidst a backdrop of pressing sustainability Grand Challenges (GCs), modern corporations face an imperative to actively engage in addressing these intricate and urgent societal and environmental issues. The United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, encompassing 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), stands as a global call to action, urging companies to transition towards sustainable practices and undergo fundamental innovations in their business models. As management research underscores, emerging technologies emerge as powerful enablers for Business Model Innovation (BMI). In this context, blockchain technology has garnered attention for its potential to significantly reshape corporate structures and markets. This study, employing an inductive approach through a multi-case analysis of four startups in the Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) sector, introduces a framework for BMI by leveraging blockchain within GC domains. This model elucidates three actionable characteristics (Asset enabler, Trust machine, Collaborative and coordinated action enhancer) through which blockchain technologies drive BMI, offering insights into how they facilitate the integration of managerial problems related to GCs into various components of novel business model designs.