Caring for the Future: The Systemic Design of Flourishing Enterprises by Jones & Upward

This paper by Peter Jones and Antony Upward, from the Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium, introduces the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Canvas which is conceptually founded on the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Ontology.

The canvas is a practitioner visual design tool that provides a common language to supports the collaborative description of past, current, or future business models that may create outcomes anywhere on a continuum of profit-prioritizing to strongly sustainable.  Strongly sustainable outcomes, a term originated by Ecological Economists, are those that "sustain the possibility that human and other life will flourish on this planet forever" (Ehrenfeld).

Subsequently the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Canvas has been further refined to become the Flourishing Business Canvas (see www.FlourishingBusiness.org for the most recent practice and developments).  Bringing this significantly improved business model canvas to market is on-going work of the 12 members of the sLab Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group who form the Flourishing Business Innovation Toolkit project team - see www.FlourishingBusiness.org for the most recent developments.

Citation and Links

Slides and other materials from the conference presentation: http://systemic-design.net/rsd3-proceedings/business-enterprise-design/

Jones, P. H., & Upward, A. (2014). Caring for the future: The systemic design of flourishing enterprises. Proceedings of the Third Symposium of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD3), Oslo, Norway, October 15-17. 1-8.  Available at academia.edu