Innovation of impact business models: a bibliometric study of scientific production on the web of science

The business model innovation to insert sustainability has been approached as a strategic point of view about social and environmental concerns, integrating itself with the objectives of organizations. In this context, impact businesses represent the effective proposal to attract part of private capital to solutions that act directly on social, environmental, and technological challenges. Because of the relevance of the impact business model, this study aims to identify the main characteristics of international scientific production related to this theme in the last ten years. Therefore, a bibliometric investigation was developed, using the Web of Science database, integrating the terms “social impact”; “social entrepreneurship”; “impact business”; “innovation”; and “business models”. A significant increase in the production associated with the theme from 2015 can be highlighted, with a continuous evolution until 2020, which denotes the emergence of the theme. Concerning thematic areas, business and management presented the highest number of publications related to the researched topics, standing out with 395 and 251 publications, respectively. The United States of America leads the ranking of countries that publish the topics of impact and innovation business model. However, England and Spain also stand out in the surveys. Among the three institutions that publish the most on the topics, the University of London, the University of Groningen, and Harvard University published the most frequently. Yet, it was possible to determine, through a sociometric analysis, the words with the highest number of occurrences, the average number of citations per document of authors who have at least five articles published, and the documents that had the highest number of citations.