Samenvatting

Small retail entrepreneurs in the Netherlands are confronted with declining turnover and ROI. A decrease and even disappearance of small retail in town centres, suburbs and villages is not just a loss of income for the people involved. It constitutes also a loss of attractiveness and economic viability for town centres and villages. Besides for specific groups of people, for instance the less mobile ones, it leads to erosion their social surrounding. Small and local retail can be seen as essential for sustainable living conditions.
In discussions and studies aimed at better viability of small retail it is proposed that sustainability forms a key element for attractive and profitable business plan. That is not just because they can and should contribute to a sustainable social living environment but maybe even more because sustainability offers opportunities for small retail that do not exist, or are more difficult to arrange, for large scale retail. The present business and marketing models for retail are not appropriate to come to sustainable retail business. Too often only the envisaged sustainability (how green it is) of a product is looked at and not the strategic role it can have when developing and running a business, in particular in view of the system(s) in which the business plays a (essential) role.
For small and medium enterprises (SME)s in general we have developed an approach called Fociss (focusing innovation for a sustainable strategy) to determine the strategic issues a company much address in view of its future viability which is essentially sustainability aimed and must lead to real sustainable businesses. It sets priorities and gives directions for further development.
This model is now being adapted for small retail because of the quite specific issues here (Fociss-R). Essential is the insight in the whole retail chain of their business and the various options and possible preferences that exist, at the supply side as well as at the consumer side.
The research project has not been ended yet as we would like to present the first results of this model to show how a framework to find new and sustainable strategic business models for SME’s is developed. We like to show also that it also forms a perfect tool to educate our students in developing effective sustainable business management information.