The Performance Economy: Business Models for the Functional Service Economy

The industrial economy creates wealth through the optimization of production processes and related material flows up to the point of sale; more growth means a higher resource throughput; a decoupling of growth and resource consumption is not possible. The shift to a more sustainable economy, to create wealth with substantially reduced flows of materials and energy, needs new business models. This chapter shows new business models to achieve the EU Lisbon objectives for 2010 — more growth and more jobs — while simultaneously reducing the resource consumption of industrialized countries. The new business models are grouped under the name of the performance economy, there common denominator is that they enable entrepreneurs to achieve a higher competitiveness with greatly reduced resource consumption and without an externalization of the costs of waste and of risk. The change from an industrial to a performance economy is full of opportunities but also obstacles. This chapter summarizes some of the major issues involved in such a shift; many others depend on the economic sector concerned and the national framework conditions in place. It also proposes two new metrics to measure the path towards the sustainability of corporations and to give sustainable investors a reliable guide for historic analysis and future projections.