The triple layered business model canvas as a tool for a social and green business transition: the case of Cirfood

The purpose of this paper is to provide a triple layered business model canvas as a strategic and operative tool for allowing companies to integrate their existing corporate policies with social and environmental aims, in order to manage an organizational transition from a traditional profit-centred business model to a social- and environmental-oriented business model. This discussion stems from the emerging need of changing radically the way in which firms do business, as a response to the increasingly evident threatens of climate change. As influencing actors in the society, in fact, companies have the responsibility to take charge of such a challenge and to embody a proactive movement against this prominent threat that the world will be called to face in the next decades. Creating shared value, promoting socially worth initiatives, reducing the environmental footprint and actively contributing to a recovery of the biodiversity are just some of the key points of how this strategic tool has been conceived in this work. Until when companies will not consider social and environmental goals at the same level of the economic ones, there will not be a clear change in the direction in which organizations are used to operate. In support of the theoretical discussion, a concrete case study is then analysed in the second part of the paper, where the triple layered business model canvas is applied to the entrepreneurial reality of Cirfood S.C., an Italian leading company committed in the collective and commercial catering sector.