Business model and sustainability: the state of the art

Our paper consist of a literature review about business model research in academia, which represents a premise to identify the main topics, as well as the evolution of the studies. As for the methodology, we used EBSCO database, searching for academic papers having ―business model‖ in the title and in the abstract published from 1975 until now. This paper contributes to the literature in two ways. First, it provides a wide analysis of the extant literature on business models. Besides the classification by main topics, we aim to outline the trend of these studies over time. Moreover, by this review we propose to understand how much literature has already investigated, and to identify new roots for future research on empirical and practical application of business model in business studies. Our work is the first step of a project. In order to contribute to previous literature, we propose to view corporate business models as the crossroads of different disciplines, as management and accounting and finance are. Further developments of our research, actually, could concern the study of the characteristics of sustainable business models applied by firms, in order to select which key factors of firms‘ business model positively affect their performance and their value