ACHIEVING SUSTAINABILITY THROUGH BUSINESS MODEL INNOVATION AND CROSS-SECTOR COLLABORATION IN BIOTECHNOLOGY STARTUPS IN INDONESIA

• Main Author: Trianti Anggarini, Lely
• Format: Theses
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/40232
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

Various initiatives to achieve social and environmental justice have occurred all over the world in the rapid hike of sustainability concern of the earth’s citizens. In the last decade, movements to bolster sustainability in every facet of life have been growing from the developed countries. Following this trend, enterprises are more and more considering sustainable innovations into their business model hence the research dwelling on this respect are increasing in the past few years. Innovations in business processes were carried out in many enterprises to compensate the harm they release to the environment. This study tries to focus on biotechnology industry that is said important in attaining sustainability objectives, as it is stated in Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This industry is deemed to operate and generate environmentallysafer processes and products. Nowadays, more and more business startups are created to be impactful. They are important in sustainability development as they possess a broad space for business model innovation than the older businesses. Today, biotechnology industry is developing extraordinarily in cluster locations all over the world. Cross-sector collaborations have been demonstrated to be the main requirement of sustainable biotechnology business. However, in spite of flourishing research scrutinizing on business model innovation for sustainability, there is no research found incorporating the cross-sector collaboration into the sustainable business model innovations on startups. Furthermore, many researches have concluded that they are important to enhance the competitive advantages of firms that is especially necessary for developing countries. Therefore, using qualitative approach, this study tries fill the gap by exploring the elements’ characteristics of business model innovation in contributing to the balance in economy, social, and environmental development and cross-sector collaboration efforts within it in biotechnology business startups. This research flows in five stages: 1) phenomena observation, literature review, and problem identification; 2) case selection; 3) data collection and transcription; 4) coding and ii data analysis; and 5) writing finalization. Indonesia is chosen for the case study as it is a country with the fourth biggest populations in the world with rapid growth in economy that provides a proper example to represent the developing countries especially the Southeast Asia. The data collection lasted during March until November 2018 in Bandung and Jakarta primarily through interviews with five biotechnology business startup owners. This study uses multi-case analysis underpinned by business model innovation concept to elaborate the sustainabilityoriented activities along their supply chain and the role of each actors involved in the actions. The analysis yields in the general description of current sustainable business model innovation of the cases, the motives of why the cases attain sustainable business model innovation, the model development of the sustainable business model innovation, and the cross-sector collaboration activities in achieving sustainability. This study found that business model innovations for sustainability in biotechnological startups are derived from three drivers: 1) market demand; 2) value chain improvement; and the 3) non-business motive. These three drivers create different characters in three approaches of innovation in business model: content, structure, and governance. The content is determined as products based on market demand and as services based on business owner’s non-business motive. A new value in the market-demand’s products would affect the structure and not always the governance, while the non-business services only affect the governance. The structure is the value chain of the products which sometimes needs governance change regarding to sustainability value improvement of the firm. Cross-sector collaboration of the cases are related to the structure and governance of the sustainable business model innovation. The firms collaborate with eight external partners: supplier, customer, other business, research institutes, communities, nongovernmental organization (NGO), government, and investor. Among all, supplier and customer are generally the most important partners for business as they are involved in most of the structure innovation. For non-business activities, only NGO, communities, other business, and the government are taking roles. Two important notes found in this study is that all biotechnology startups initiated their business regarding the owner's value of sustainability; and that they perform non-business activites regularly mainly by sharing knowledge to the society. These characteristics are uncommon to be found in large companies which in general focusing only on the economic gain. The findings shed light regarding the practiced strategy of business model innovation and cross-sector collaborations of biotechnology startups to achieve sustainable development, especially in Indonesia. They are important as a reference for sustainability-focused future study and as guidance for starting enterprises in biotechnology, especially focusing in developing countries.