Regenerative business, business sustainability, strategy, adoption, cross-sector analysis, mixed methods, dissemination

The Mapping Actions for Regenerative Business Leadership across Sectors (MARBLES) project aims to gain a broad empirical understanding regarding regenerative business practices across various industries. Regenerative business is defined as business activities that enhance and thrive through the health of ecosystems in a co-evolutionary process. It is a novel business approach that aims to go beyond reducing negative impacts of business activities on ecosystems and their functioning.

While much of the existing research on regenerative focuses on pioneering niche actors from sectors like agriculture or tourism, this proposal seeks a broader empirical foundation across sectors, including manufacturing, services, and beyond, to examine how broadly and deeply regenerative business practices are taken up by diverse industries. Specifically, the project will investigate three key dimensions:
1. How companies adopt regenerative business The project will explore how businesses understand and implement regenerative principles, analyzing whether there is alignment between academic definitions and practical applications. We will map and categorize existing practices and approaches of regenerative business.
2. Who adopts regenerative practices The project will identify which sectors and companies are most likely to adopt regenerative practices, focusing on gaps in adoption among industries less directly reliant on ecosystems.
3. Why businesses adopt regenerative practices The project will analyze the drivers (e.g., risk exposure, strategic motivations) and barriers (e.g., disruptiveness, lack of peer legitimacy) influencing the adoption of regenerative business. It will differentiate between symbolic adoption (for legitimacy) and substantive efforts (driven by ecological risks).

To provide broad empirical evidence on regenerative business across companies from different sectors, we will apply several methods and instruments. We will collect from corporate websites and reports (using web scrapping tools), through conducting a survey among 500 regenerative companies, targeted at their sustainability officers and board members responsible for sustainability, and a shorter survey to 350 companies with similar features but without regenerative strategies, as well as through three focus groups industry leaders and policymakers to validate and triangulate our findings.

The project seeks to provide academic, practical, and societal contributions. Academically, it will offer the first large-scale empirical insights into regenerative practices, drivers, and obstacles across sectors, establishing a foundation for future research. Practically, it aims to create a regenerative business guidebook to assist companies in adopting regenerative strategies effectively. Societally, widespread adoption of regenerative principles is crucial for restoring ecosystem health, making this research vital for fostering systemic change.