Industrial sufficiency in manufacturing business models: development and validation of a business-model-level scoring model

Abstract

Manufacturing systems are major drivers of resource use and environmental impacts, and current trajectories indicate that efficiency and consistency strategies alone are unlikely to achieve the absolute reductions required to stay within planetary boundaries. Sufficiency, understood here as moderating absolute demand for material goods and intensifying the use of existing assets, is increasingly discussed as a third, complementary sustainability strategy alongside efficiency and consistency, but remains weakly operationalized at the business-model level, resulting in a low transparency on sufficiency. This article addresses the resulting measurement gap by developing and empirically validating a business-model-level scoring model for industrial sufficiency in manufacturing firms. Building on sufficiency literature and business-model frameworks, the study adopts a Design Science Research approach to derive three assessment dimensions: Value Proposition, Value Creation & Delivery, and Value Capture, operationalized through eight sufficiency-related parameters scored on a three-point ordinal scale. The model validated through five expert interviews with practitioners from manufacturing companies using a mixed-methods validation design that combines standardized ratings and qualitative comments. The results show that the model can be applied as a lean self-assessment tool, discriminates between different maturity levels across parameters, and, in the participating firms’ self-assessments, highlights comparatively low maturity levels in parameters such as sufficiency in supply chain and logistics, pricing strategies for promoting sufficiency, and sufficiency-oriented value capture. The study concludes that the scoring model fills a gap between largely qualitative sufficiency frameworks and outcome-oriented assessment tools such as LCA or ESG metrics. For practitioners, it offers a structured basis for self-assessment and strategic prioritization of sufficiency measures at business-model level; for researchers, it provides an operational instrument that can be further tested, calibrated and extended in future empirical work.