Coupling Responsible Innovation and Sustainable Business Model Innovation to Address Grand Challenges

Innovations designed to address grand challenges within the social innovation sector can have unintended consequences, particularly where organizations pursue triple-bottom-line objectives under resource constraints. Yet research on coupling responsible innovation (RI) and sustainable business model innovation (SBMI) largely frames this as aspirational rather than theoretical, leaving it conceptually underdeveloped and empirically underexplored. Accordingly, this study asks: How can organizations operating within institutionally weak environments embed RI to make their SBMI processes more responsible? Utilizing a 10-year longitudinal study of a social enterprise delivering off-grid solar in Africa, we identify three SBMI cycles and develop a process framework for RI-SBMI coupling. We outline four RI-shaped organizational capacities that support business model evolution as a dynamic, principle-driven process in which RI functions as a sensitizing framework rather than a fixed ethical template. We further demonstrate that paradox management, through the mechanisms of experimentation, relinquishing control, and value prioritization, is central to responsible SBMI. We also show that RI principles are not applied equally; instead, their importance changes depending on organizational capacity and the part of the business model. Finally, by grounding these dynamics in an institutionally weak context, the study advances theory on responsible business model evolution.