VALUE CO-CREATION IN SUSTAINABLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY ON SMES’ BUSINESS MODEL INNOVATION

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in sustainable entrepreneurship from both scholars and practitioners. The term focuses on generating not only business value, but also creating social and environmental values (Nicolopoulou et al., 2016). However, sustainable entrepreneurs face challenges when trying to implement novel solutions to meet the triple bottom line. Thus, sustainable entrepreneurship requires changes to and/or adopting innovative business models to achieve the environment, organisation and social goals. Little is understood about business model that can support sustainable entrepreneurs and their innovations to generate business, social and environmental values (Lüdeke -Freund, 2020). Co-creation is another relevant concept in this study (von Hippel, 2005) as value is ‘always co-created, jointly and reciprocally between providers and beneficiaries through integration of resources and combination of competences. Thus, firms must engage with stakeholders to co-create business, social and environmental values. Despite many benefits of value co-creation from new product/service development (Yang and Leposky, 2022), customer engagement (Payne et al. 2008) to financial outcomes (Zaborek and Mazur, 2019), there is limited empirical evidence on value co-creation in sustainable entrepreneurship. This study is motivated to examine these research questions: “How do specialist coffee shops co-create value with their key actors?” and “What are motivational drivers, barriers, pre-conditions and outcomes of co-creation for specialist coffee shops?”.