This study examines what technology-based startups treat as external triggers for initiating sustainable business model innovation (SBMI) through an interview-centered, comparative qualitative study of 31 sustainability-oriented startups in the Netherlands. The 46 semi-structured interviews conducted during 2023–2025 were complemented by archival material to develop a multilevel framework of external triggers. The analysis identifies seven trigger domains across two distinct levels. At the value network level, startups report customer and user adoption expectations for greener solutions, ecosystem gatekeeper and competitive pressures, impact-oriented finance and public funding conditions, and digital trust, traceability, and transparency requirements in procurement and inter-organizational exchange. At the institutional level, startups report clean-tech trajectories and socio-technical infrastructures, rules, standards, and compliance regimes, and societal climate and circularity norms shaping legitimacy climates and solution spaces. The findings show that SBMI initiation is not prompted by an undifferentiated set of generic environmental factors, but by structured multilevel triggers that impact startups through distinct ecosystem channels and prompt reconsideration of value creation, value delivery, and value capture.

Business model dynamics are key to the success of companies. This is particularly the case for sustainability-oriented companies that aim to tackle grand challenges by rethinking how companies create, deliver, and capture value, which can combine profit orientation with social and environmental purposes. However, understanding how companies transit towards sustainable business models through the change of company value logics remains unclear and current business model frameworks cannot capture such dynamics. Combining insights from the literature on sustainable business models and business model dynamics, our study proposed a comprehensive sustainable dynamic business model framework. The proposed framework takes into account the main elements of a sustainable business model and present the mechanisms that drive different sustainability-oriented values, and how their values change and are influenced by internal and external factors during the company development process. The framework is applied in multiple-case analysis of different PV companies in China. The application of the framework shows that it is able to present the mechanisms that drive different sustainability-oriented values and to capture business model dynamics in a comprehensive way and that it allows for case study comparison. The results of our research have significant implications for business model, both in theory and practice.

Business model innovation and Business Model Canvas, as well-known business model architectures, have gradually become an essential topic in entrepreneurship education. The application of Business Model Canvas is considered an effective and reliable unit of analysis to measure companies business operations and performance. It helps students to first analyze the Business Model Canvas of an existing business and then create their own business idea. Although the Business Model Canvas helps students to get a quick view on the business operations through the creation, delivery and capture of value, in practice, entrepreneurs need to adapt and change their business operations constantly in order to grow and remain viable. Considering the need to capture the business dynamics in business model framework, the aim of this paper is to propose a dynamic business model framework as an alternative tool. Engineering students at Delft University of Technology were asked to critically assess the limitations of the existing business model canvas, and then students gave input and assessed an alternative dynamic business model. The results show that the current Business Model Canvas cannot capture the business model innovation of companies and the proposed framework improves student's understanding of business model innovation and in particular their dynamic nature.

Academic spin-off facilitators support high-tech academic spin-offs and help them to navigate various barriers and critical junctures during their growth stages. In this article we draw on stage-gate models, the path-dependency, and resource based view to identify start-ups' resource needs as perceived by both facilitators and by entrepreneurs. Using qualitative data based on in-depth interviews with 18 academic spin-off facilitators and nine spin-off founders, from three technical universities in the Netherlands, we explore the critical junctures and key support activities. The results show that founders appreciate milestones and direct interface regarding business support, business plan development, and legal support during the early growth stages. In all stages, in particular during the later stages, founders appreciate different type of network support (e.g., start-up network and industry) and when facilitators act as intermediaries to guide them in the network. This helps spin-offs to gain credibility and reach out to the market. This article adds to current research on academic facilitators and in particular incubators by providing a more comprehensive explanation for the low usage of the incubator's resources. By matching key resources and support activities that can navigate particular critical junctures, we try to promote the successful transition from one stage to the other. Our findings offer significant implications, both theoretical and practical, for academic entrepreneurship literature.

Business model dynamics is important, because high-tech companies, the technology that they commercialize, and the market in which they operate all change over time. We build on the dynamic capability view of the firm to explain business model evolution and innovation, looking particularly at the dynamics that are created by interactions between business model components over time. We use the following four criteria to assess the degree of dynamics in business model frameworks: completeness of business model aspects, interrelationships between aspects, interrelationships over time, and framework changes over time and across contexts. Business model completeness involves internal company aspects and external environmental aspects. Interrelationships of business model aspects are required to assess business model coherence, which is an important indicator of business model quality. Interrelationships between the environment and business model aspects are required to assess the fit of a particular business model in its context. Interrelationships of these aspects over time are needed to understand business model evolution. Finally, business model frameworks need to be adapted over time and across contexts to keep frameworks simple and useful yet complete. Our analysis shows that current business model frameworks do not meet all four criteria, and thus only partly incorporate dynamics.