Welcome to NBM2026

Toulouse, France

29 June 2026: Doctoral Colloquium
30 june - 1 July 2026: Conference Dates

Ten years after its inaugural edition at TBS Education in 2016, the 11th International Conference on New Business returns to Toulouse, reaffirming its role as a leading platform for spirited dialogue and debate in the field of sustainable business model innovation.

This year’s conference takes place against a backdrop of three transformative—and often contradictory—global dynamics :

• Growth vs. Planetary Boundaries

• A Great Ecological Backlash

• AI’s Surging Hidden Costs

These dynamics fuel the vigorous debates about the limitations of current sustainability frameworks. Critics contend that approaches rooted in “weak sustainability”—prioritising efficiency gains, green growth, or techno-solutionism—fail to address root causes of ecological breakdown (Alexander, 2012; Kurz, 2019; Parrique, 2020). Such models maintain unsustainable resource dependence while failing to address rebound effects that typically offset their benefits (Zink and Geyer, 2017). Although alternative paradigms—such as sufficiency, strong circularity, and regenerative models—are increasingly recognized as essential pathways, their real-world applicability and transformative potential require significantly more research.

Beyond these ecological concerns, the social dimensions of sustainability remain sidelined. While poverty reduction has advanced globally, imbalances persist: rising inequalities, exclusion from development gains, and disruptions from AI transition threaten to leave communities behind. Addressing these challenges necessitates business models that simultaneously achieve ecological integrity and equitable value creation, ensuring just transitions for vulnerable communities.

In this pivotal context— where businesses must catalyse macro-level transitions while navigating ecological backlash and technological disruption—the NBM2026 conference will serve as a forum for practice-oriented, impact-driven research on sustainable business models across four levels of analysis: system level, sectorial and organisational level, organisational impact level and theoretical and methodological foundations.

Successive editions of this conference have nurtured a strong and growing academic community in sustainable business models. For NBM2026, we aim to provide a forum for dialogue and reflection that welcomes studies which (i) examine and characterise local experimentations and their business model archetypes—especially within a strong-sustainability perspective that seeks to curb ever-increasing volumes and resource consumption; (ii) assess their applicability in other contexts; (iii) analyse the pathways to mainstreaming sustainable business models through upscaling and dissemination—moving beyond pioneering actors toward adoption by a broader majority of firms and customers; and (iv) critically investigate the limits of these processes with respect to enabling a macro-level transition.

We look forward to seeing you in Toulouse for another unforgettable New Business Models Conference!

Dr. Alexandre Besson, Dr. Rémi Beulque, Pr. Pascal Guiraud, Dr. Helen Micheaux, Pr Ludovic Montastruc - Conference chairs