Escalating health concerns for the last few years have prompted experts to advocate for business model innovation as a means for companies to address health issues effectively. By incorporating preventive measures into their value propositions through Sustainable Business Model Innovation (SBMI), companies can offer products, like functional food, that contribute to public health. This study explores SBMI in the nutrition industry, targeting preventive healthcare, a core component of public health, as identified by the WHO.

While implementing SBMI, companies incorporate the creation of sustainable value into their business models and engage a network of actors, particularly consumers, for the co-creation of both economic and social value. However, within this network, companies encounter tensions in the co-creation between economic and social value, while the mechanisms for navigating this process remain quite vaguely described in the corresponding literature. Co-creation can both facilitate and exacerbate tensions between economic and social value: this depends on potential contradictions and frictions that emerge between the creation of economic and social value, especially when companies and consumers prioritize differently, favoring either rapid profit maximization or addressing long-term societal problems, such as consumer health retention. Thus, decision-making in favor of economic value often contradicts solutions for social problems in the long-term. Focusing on the context of business model innovation in the nutrition industry, this study explores how companies navigate intertemporal tensions in co-creation of economic value (profitability) and social value (health retention). By exploring SBMIs led by international companies, we hope to explicate these tensions in making crucial decisions as well as navigating mechanisms of these tensions.

The results of the study are intended to contribute to prevention-led innovations related to functional food, leading to societal impact aligned with UN Sustainable Development Goals #2, #3, and #17.