Designing value propositions for sustainability: The use of speculative storytelling to explore future mobility

In today’s turbulent world and a future difficult to anticipate, organizations need to redefine their business logic towards sustainability. Thus, the need for future-making practices is more important than ever. This paper explores speculative storytelling as such a future-making practice and as an instrument for creating an awareness of value proposition for sustainability design. The approach is interdisciplinary building on business model innovation and literary studies. The study uses data provided by short stories composed by non-customer stakeholders to be utilized in the initial stages of designing a value proposition for sustainability. The data was analyzed according to a benefit and sacrifice model capturing the emotional, social and functional values. The data was also studied through a chronotopic lens. The results show that the suggested approach is suitable for the production of narratives to be used as objects for learning and change within the context of value propositions for sustainability.