Sustainable Transition and Business Model Development : A Case Study on the Swedish Forest Industry

Sammanfattning

Sustainable transitions in industries are increasingly important. The Swedish forest industry is making efforts by creating the project TREE to help decarbonize their transport sector, gathering actors throughout their industry. It serves as a good basis for exploring the challenges that occur when transitioning in an ecosystem, both in terms of their internal difficulties, but also their alignment when contributing to the transition in which they are dependent on each other. The aim was to explore these challenges that occur from an organizational- and ecosystem perspective related to business model development. The three literature streams of transition theory, innovation ecosystems and business model development formed a foundation where both the aspects of organizations and ecosystems were explored. Following that, an exploratory study was conducted with data gathered mainly from qualitative interviews with people working in- and around the defined ecosystem of actors within the TREE project. A total of 13 interviews were made with 12 informants, of which three were considered external to the defined ecosystem. The data was analyzed with an open and explorative approach inspired by Gioia (Corley and Gioia, 2004) to uncover new insights, which resulted in five aggregated dimensions (Technological barriers, Project serves different purposes, Haulers dependent on forest company, Resistance to change and Decision-making shifting inside transport companies) representing the main findings. The results gave a number of prominent challenges both regarding business model development and that of collective value. Internal tensions and the changing role of the driver were the most prominent challenges of business model development. For ecosystems, capturing the collective value and running multiple business models stood out as the greatest challenges. Digitalization emerged as a requirement for the whole ecosystem to transition, and the role of transport provider was discussed in relation to a previous study. Lastly, two tensions and two paradoxes were identified, which were Control vs. Flexibility, Project vs. Business as tensions and Competition vs. Collaboration, Dependency vs. Change as the paradoxes. The master’s thesis contributes with valuable considerations for sustainable transitions with similar ecosystem setups, or in an equally early stage.