Business transition management: exploring a new role for business in sustainability transitions

In our paper we seek to conceptually interpret business strategies related to sustainability from a transition perspective. We argue that there is an emergent trend of businesses and industries that move beyond optimizing the organization's individual performance, by mitigating negative environmental and social impacts, to fundamentally restructuring and rethinking existing businesses in light of broader societal changes. By means of the transition framework, we conceptualize the development of new sustainable business models as a new phase in corporate responsibility, in which societal sustainability challenges are translated into new socio-economic business models implying fundamental transitions within businesses. We then outline the basic contours of an approach that seeks to make business transitions to sustainable systems manageable in terms of influencing speed and direction of business transitions by adapting the transition management framework. We describe the framework of business transition management in a number of interlinked activities based on an experimental participatory case study of the transition in the Dutch roof sector.