Circular Green and Sustainable Business Model Competence Innovation and Development: Challenges with Privacy and GDPR Related to Businesses and Research
Authors: Lindgren Peter 
Published: May 2024

Increased focus and vision on faster circular green and sustainable transformation in businesses and research have now turned out to be highly linked to also the social and the competence dimension of “the triple bottom line” approach and measurements. The social economic part of the triple bottom line approach has shown to be increasingly important, but very challenging to operate under the existing Privacy and GDPR regulations. To fulfil and measure how green the human, organizational systems and culture competence components actually are in business models today is not that much investigated. Focus has more been on “greening” the technology part of the competence components but now a number of advanced technologies seems promising to help measure green competences. It opens up for measuring circular, green and sustainable business model competences in some new and more advanced ways, but it could potentially result in the business do not comply with Privacy and GDPR regulations.
Ever since the branching of the scholarly literature on competences of the early 1960’s businesses have constantly being experimenting with business model competence design, reengineering, development and measuring. Creating Green Business Model (GBM’s) competences is no exception. Designing TO BE GBM’s and reconfiguration of AS IS BM’s to become GBM’s and later develop these is in focus – but until now the main focus has been on greening technologies. Very few knows how to “greening” and measure green related to human competences, organizational systems and culture. GBM competence reconfiguration has also mainly focused on changing or reconfiguring AS IS Business Models technology competences.
More and more businesses have realised that investing in new technologies or changing existing technologies are not enough to reach the vision and goals of green transformation. Technologies alone cannot release the full potential and requests of green transformation – reduce the use of material and resources, reduce the waste and spill, reduce the pollution including Co2 and increase biodiversity. The Business will simply not by technologies alone be able “to climb” and “pass” “the Green Wall” without innovating, developing the BM competences – HR, Organizational systems and Culture into becoming greener and thereby support green transformation in the businesses.
Reconfiguring AS IS business model competences to become greener is complex and calls for new and advanced approaches that challenge classical BM competence frameworks and understanding. Green Parameters and Profit are no longer the main focus in GBMI and changing some BM dimensions and components – or even adding new business model dimensions to the BM is neither enough. If business want to remain competitive, efficient and at the same time green, it requires a different GBMI approach and mindset – including measuring BM Competences. This challenges the compliance of Privacy and GDPR related to both businesses and research. The request for circularity and sustainability just adds to the complexity of measuring.
We offer a review of three Privacy and GDPR GBMI compliance cases and challenges in three different businesses with the aim of achieving greater understanding of Privacy and GDPR challenges both for businesses and researchers. We identify issues behind the apparent challenges of Privacy and GDPR in GBMI and discuss how strategic GBMI can contribute to further research on Privacy and GDPR in different fields of Green Business Modelling, offering future research directions of Privacy and GDPR.