13750: Sustainable Business Model Innovation: Scale Development and Validation (session 25696)

Sustainable business model innovation (SBMI) has attracted considerable interest from scholars and business practitioners for its potential to advance sustainable development. Following numerous conceptual and qualitative case-based research on SBMI, scholars increasingly call for large-sample empirical quantitative studies to produce generalizable results. However, the lack of a comprehensively conceptualized, rigorously developed, and validated measurement scale of SBMI has impeded empirical quantitative studies in this domain. To address this gap, we conceptualize, develop, and validate a new SBMI scale through research conducted across five sub-studies. Drawing on two samples of 180 and 237 firms from the United States, we specified and assessed the scale, ultimately providing a hierarchical, three-level reflective-formative-formative model for measuring SBMI. We use thirty-four reflective indicators to measure nine first-order subdimensions of SBMI. These nine subdimensions combine into three second-order dimensions, which collectively form the overall SBMI construct. This study provides a foundation for advancing theory development and empirical research on SBMI by clarifying the SBMI construct clarity and establishing a psychometrically reliable and valid instrument for measuring SBMI.

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