Sustainable business model innovation and acceptance of its practices among Spanish entrepreneurs

Abstract

Sustainable business model innovation debate is mostly focusing on the use of certain practices and tools to implement sustainable objectives in new firms. Our paper contributes to this debate examining the factors influencing the entrepreneur's election of the practices to develop sustainable business model innovation (SBMI). We conducted an empirical analysis on a population of Spanish entrepreneurs (N = 234) and applied a sound behavioral framework and the PLS-SEM algorithms to factor out those elements. On the basis of this analysis, we argue that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, hedonic motivation, habit, costs, speed, funding, and security and behavioral intention might affect the entrepreneurial acceptance of the practices leading to SBMI. We also argue that the knowledge of these factors benefit incubators, mentors, and agencies balance them into their support to sustainable business development. Our analyses open a novel research line by studying those factors influencing entrepreneurial use of sustainable innovation practices and facilitating future development of full-scale models explaining this usage.