Digital climate start-ups and their value proposition for the natural environment as a key stakeholder

Climate change (CC) is one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced, and despite concerted global efforts over the past two decades to address it, improvements have been disappointing. Notably, the average temperatures over the last decade have reached unprecedented levels, marking the year 2023 as the warmest on record. This alarming trend carries significant consequences for the planet. In this context, there is an increasing effort to understand the significance of involving businesses (and entrepreneurs) in addressing this challenge, as this sector has a great potential to deliver innovation, accelerate technology adoption, develop new business models and technologies, finance initiatives and deploy solutions world-wide. Together with this, it is expected that digitalisation will play a major role in the search for a more sustainable planet, as digital technologies (DT) can achieve the global scale required to make a meaningful impact in the fight against CC. Although the current dominance of sustainability and digitalisation as the drivers for societal changes and the increasing overlap between them, academic research on their interconnectedness is still scarce, providing a fertile ground for management and business academic research.

Thus, this PhD research shows an in-depth study of Business Models (BM) developed by firms that use DT as a core element of their value proposition to tackle CC. It also seeks to contribute to the literature on stakeholder theory as it provides novel insights on the natural environment as a stakeholder. The two research questions (RQ) that guide this investigation are: How do we unpack the value proposition of digital start-ups tackling CC? and how can digital climate start-ups (DCS) improve their value proposition for the natural environment as a key stakeholder? This is an empirical research based on multiple-case study analysis of firms that emerged as a response to CC. It considers mixed methods of study, including semi-structured interviews with CEOs and Founders of 27 firms. Results include an empirical taxonomy framework of DCS, an extended version of the Stakeholder Value Creation Framework for BM Analysis, and a proposal of attributes to improve the value proposition of DCS.