AN INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY PERSPECTIVE ON SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS MODELS: THE CASE OF SUSTAINABLE DISTRICT HEATING

Johanna Ayrault and Franck Aggeri ()
Additional contact information
Johanna Ayrault: CGS i3 - Centre de Gestion Scientifique i3 - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Franck Aggeri: CGS i3 - Centre de Gestion Scientifique i3 - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: The district heating (DH) market is undergoing a change with the emergence of Sustainable District Heating (SDH), based on renewable locale resources, as a building block for a local ecological transition. However, research on DH tends to focus on technological solutions to support this transition. Business models, especially innovative and sustainable business models (SBM) are overlooked although management scholars have stressed they played a key role in ecological transitions. SDH have a strong local anchorage with the integration of multiple stakeholders to the BM since resources at stake may be varied and require strong coordination and the setting of governance mechanisms to build durable networks. The complexity of such networks is well described on the industrial ecology literature. To what extent the industrial ecology framework may help to design another perspective on SBM for DH at a local scale? To answer this question we analyze two French DH case studies that were pioneers in the integration of renewable heat to their energy mix. We stress how the introduction of a new value proposition, based on sustainable concerns, can change the set of resources and competences and organization (both internal and external), which according to Demil and Lecocq (2010) represent the three pillars in dynamic interaction of a BM. We also study this change through the industrial ecology framework (Brullot, 2009), especially focusing on the design of a shared imaginary and governance as two aspects ensuring the durability of the SBM.

Keywords: Industrial ecology; Sustainable business models; District heating (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-06-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://minesparis-psl.hal.science/hal-03388564v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in EURAM 2021 - Reshaping capitalism for a sustainable world, Jun 2021, online, Canada

Downloads: (external link)
https://minesparis-psl.hal.science/hal-03388564v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03388564

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().