Sustainability as a service

Insofar as it propagates intangible value such as information, knowledge, awareness, methods, and tools, among others, sustainability is essentially a service. Yet it is inherently complex and necessarily comprehensive in nature. As such, it should account for and holistically integrate the environmental, social and economic dimensions of life. But it is not enough to merely account for those dimensions as whole entities, but rather, they should be broken down into and examined at various levels and scales, i.e., from individuals to societies, from the short- to the long-term, and from local to global. Such a task is understandably impossible to deliver in a single service, and therefore, sustainability as a service usually involves multiple providers and customers who must take active part in the value co-creation process to produce and deliver the service. Nevertheless, defining sustainability as a service extends the relations between sustainability and service beyond the incorporation of sustainability into services, directing the focus on sustainability itself. In addition, it allows sustainability practice to adopt the methodologies, frameworks, knowledge, methods and tools that were designed and developed to produce and deliver services and to organize the features of sustainability into a well-defined value-chain.