Exploratory Case Study on Sustainability Awareness with a Startup for Business Models Birgit Penzenstadler Anoushka Mara Stephanie Nam Brian Budzinski CSU Long Beach, USA CSU Long Beach CSU Long Beach, USA Partneur Lappeenranta Univ. of Techn., Finland Long Beach, USA Los Alamitos High School, USA Long Beach, USA birgit.penzenstadler@csulb.edu anoushkamara@gmail.com stepha789@gmail.com brian@partneur.com Abstract—Start-up businesses are often not primarily con- curriculum and standards of business planning [18] nor re- cerned with the overall sustainability impact of their business quirements engineering [23]. Despite showing up in research idea. However, designing sustainability into the start-up business over the past ten years, there is little strategic support by idea from the start may improve their long-term impacts and success but requires additional knowledge and time. In this RE for integrating sustainability into the subsequent design paper, we perform a case study of the start-up Partneur, who process [3]. As a result, there is no strategic support tailored are developing an online platform for developing business ideas towards explicitly integrating sustainability into the subse- according to the Business Model Canvas. We show the usage of quent design process of a start-up business plan. In order our artifact-based analysis approach and discuss observations to incorporate sustainability into the long-term vision of a and lessons learned. The approach provided new insights to Partneur, and might, in turn, inform their future users on how business, we apply an artifact-based approach that visualizes to incorporate sustainability into their business idea as well. the potential goals and their impacts on sustainability in the Index Terms—sustainability awareness; requirements engi- different dimensions. neering; evaluation research; artifact orientation; Our contribution to easing the challenge of limited resources and sustainability knowledge when developing a business idea I. I NTRODUCTION is a set of diagrams (e.g., stakeholders, goals, use cases) and guidelines for sustainability awareness (e.g., five dimensions Society’s innovation and progress has come with many of sustainability) as initially proposed in [23]. costs whether in environmental, economic, societal, technical, We contribute a case study that serves as an example to and many other dimensions. In general, sustainability is a start-ups demonstrating how they can visualize the goals of concern of rising importance for companies [5]. There is their business and align them with sustainability. While we an increasing number of startups, yet these new businesses do this for a business that uses the Business Model Canvas have limited resources and lack extensive knowledge on (BMC) as their main guideline to develop their prototype, we sustainability. As a result, they resort to focusing on the are not attempting to constructively critique any specific type development of a minimum viable product [27]. The rise of business model but instead offer an artifact-based approach of startups has radically changed not only the tech industry rooted in requirements engineering to explore any type of but also commerce as a whole. The startup scene is fed business model with regards to their sustainability impacts. by young developers and entrepreneurs, many of which are The diagrams and models serve as a mapping of concept to just about to graduate from college. To give them a better clarify and help in the development of their business idea in the foundation in skills that are relevant to getting a business short run and long run. The implementation of sustainability off the ground, CSULB founded the College of Business principles (as proposed, e.g., in the Karlskrona Manifesto [4]) Administration “Business Incubator” (https://www.csulb.edu/ from the start of a business idea diminishes long run risks cba-graduate-programs/cob-incubator). The Business Incuba- and allow for greater success [15]. This paper completes a tor consists of a group of engaged young entrepreneurs that case study with a local startup, Partneur (www.partneur.com) leads a series of talks on topics relevant to startups. The and provides models of their stakeholders, goals, system Business Incubator is advised and supported by a business vision, use cases, and sustainability awareness diagram. They administration professor, Prof. Wade Martin. Over the course give an overview of the most important requirements for the of a semester, interested students can participate in the talks system development of Partneur. With the analysis, Partneur and receive mentorship. is equipped with the resources and knowledge needed to gear Designing sustainability into a start-up business idea from their business toward a resilient and sustainable business. the beginning may improve the long-term impacts and success The impact of this case study of an artifact-based approach of the business. The problem is that such efforts require to systems engineering for sustainability serves as an example additional knowledge and time in terms of research, and then for other companies in early development stages, or even integrating the acquired knowledge into business plan drafts, companies that are further down the road and want to improve while sustainability is not yet integrated into the traditional the long-term plan for their business. The case study of this paper can be followed and replicated to provide businesses to three orders of impacts or effects of software systems [4], with the guidance they may otherwise not yet have available. [6]. Immediate effects are attributed directly to the lifecycle Thus, the study contributes to a knowledge base [29], [3] and of the system through the resources used for its production, facilitates designing sustainability into new business idea and usage, and disposal. Enabling effects are caused by the usage systems development. of the system in its application environment, and potentially by many users over a period of time (months to a couple II. R ELATED W ORK AND BACKGROUND of years). The structural effects show when accumulating the We introduce our foundation work on Requirements Engi- aggregated effects of usage by many users over an extended neering for Sustainability and sustainability awareness diagram period of time (years or decades) [13]. that helped assess the Partneur prototype. The work by Seyff et al. [29] presented a tabular version of the sustainability analysis using as elicitation method a A. Requirements Engineering for Sustainability (RE4S) modified WinWin Negotiation Model and the EasyWinWin Partneur is developing a software system to support their method to support the negotiation of requirements and their business process, and requirements are the key leverage point impact on sustainability. This includes identifying affected for practitioners who want to develop sustainable software- sustainability dimensions, discussing how immediate, enabling intensive systems [3]. We use the term RE4S as defined in pre- and structural effects are manifested, and how these effects vious work [21]: Requirements Engineering for Sustainability should be taken into account in the development of a system. (RE4S) denotes “the concept of using requirements engineer- The results support the authors’ view that every requirement ing and sustainable development techniques to improve the affects sustainability and each such effect should be considered environmental, social, and economic sustainability of software if the full view of the system’s impact on sustainability is to systems and their direct and indirect effects on the surrounding be observed [29]. business and operational context” [21]. In order to develop such systems, we need awareness (by education) and guidance C. Case Study: Partneur (e.g., by training), and creativity (to find better solutions). This explorative study was conducted with the start-up The RE4S approach uses an artifact model, guiding questions, company Partneur. They were selected upon discussion with checklists, and reference models to elaborate the requirements various start-up companies based on the common interest for a system under development. The entire approach is of learning more about how Partneur could strengthen their described in detail in [21] and example specifications have business vision in terms of sustainability. Furthermore, the been provided in [26], [7]. Furthermore, example artifacts are Partneur founders are involved in the Business Incubator that provided in the results section of this article. A customized serves as multiplier and knowledge disseminator amongst version of the AMDiRE artifact model [10], the RE4S artifact aspiring start-up founders on campus but also from the public model as adapted for this case study is depicted in a simplified community in and around Long Beach. manner in Fig. 1. It contains a stakeholder model, a goal Their main business idea is to provide an online platform model, a system vision, a usage model, and a sustainability for collaboration on the development of business plans. The awareness diagram (explained in detail in the next section). underlying model they use for these business plans is the Business Model Canvas (BMC) [18]. B. Sustainability Awareness Diagram The Sustainability Awareness Diagram (SuSAD) [3] is a D. Business Model Canvas diagram to provide an overview of the impacts of system As explained in [18], a business model can “best be de- on the five dimensions of sustainability [24] in the three scribed through nine basic building blocks that show the logic orders of effect [13]. The dimensions are environmental, of how a company intends to make money”. The nine blocks economic, social, individual, and technical [3]. The environ- cover the four main areas of a business: customers, offer, in- mental dimension refers to the usage and protection of natural frastructure, and financial viability. The business model is like resources. The economic dimension refers to the ability to a blueprint for a strategy to be implemented through organiza- preserve value and capital. The social dimension refers to tional structures, processes, and systems. The original business the ability of societies to preserve the solidarity and services. model canvas is a template with blocks for customer segments, The individual dimension refers to the ability of the people value propositions, channels, customer relationships, revenue to live their lives and express themselves in freedom. The streams, key resources, key activities, key partnerships, and technical dimension relates to the longevity of socio-technical cost structure. An organization serves one or several customer systems. Impact on sustainability can be observed via impact segments. It seeks to solve customer problems and satisfy on one or more of its dimensions. As a result, it is advocated customer needs with value propositions. Value propositions are that sustainability requires simultaneous consideration of these delivered to customers through communication, distribution, interrelated dimensions [4]. Nevertheless, interdependencies and sales channels. Customer relationships are established and exist between these dimensions including tradeoffs that may maintained with each customer segment. Revenue streams re- have to be negotiated for a system under analysis [3]. In sult from value propositions successfully offered to customers. addition, we can also consider the five dimensions in relation Key resources are the assets required to offer and deliver the previously described elements by performing a number of key Information providers, Regulatory, Implementers, End Users activities. Some activities are outsourced and some resources and Post Implementation support [25]. A stakeholder model are acquired outside the enterprise to key partnerships. The is used to define the various stakeholders of a system, and business model elements result in the cost structure [18]. visually represent them along with their connection to the Note that this paper does not endorse one type of business system. It can be represented through UML actor hierarchies, plan over another but that our case study partner Partneur is informal hierarchical graphics or natural language [25]. developing an online platform to enable people to collabo- The stakeholder diagram is a UML representation of the dif- ratively work on a business model canvas, and that is the ferent classes of stakeholders of Partneur. Here, the stakehold- business idea that we are analyzing using the artifact-based ers are classified into groups based on their role in the system. requirements engineering for sustainability (RE4S) approach. Firstly, we have the founders of Partneur who presently have a majority stake in the system. They are the founders and key III. R ESEARCH D ESIGN innovators of this tool. They are responsible for the planning, This exploratory case study [9] was carried out in the Fall decision-making, execution and control of the system. They semester of 2018 at the California State University, Long are advised by a team of Experts, namely Business Analysts Beach. The research objective was to perform a structured and Domain Experts. Business Analysts advise the Owners on approach to requirements engineering and a sustainability the best ways to optimize the business, predict future trends for awareness diagram for a local startup company. the system and improve the decision-making process. Domain The selection of the case study partner was based on Experts provide feedback and solutions about a specific topic availability and potential for impact. Partneur is a local start- or area of interest in this industry. up company in its first steps that is founded by four young Next, we have a team of developers who are collectively entrepreneurs who graduated from CSULB and run the Busi- responsible for the creation, maintenance and security of the ness Incubator on campus. Thus, a successful application of Partneur website and online tool. They include Engineers, IT the RE4S and SuSAD approach could inform many start-ups in Security, Troubleshooting team and Testers. We also have a the making and support their business and system development Marketing team to analyze the positioning of the product, as the Business Incubator serves as a knowledge disseminator. devise strategies to gain more users and effectively reach out The research objective was to apply the artifact-based re- to the target market. Further, there is a Legal team and a team quirements engineering approach including the sustainability of Online regulators to check the decorum of the users in using awareness diagram to the case of a local start-up company in the tool, safeguard the intellectual property of the system and their early development stages, and to evaluate the usability keep a check on disruptive teams or negative activity. of the approach for the (inexperienced) requirements engineers The primary users of Partneur are individuals with little and usefulness of the results for the founders. or almost no background in business. The aim of the tool is to guide the users through a step by step process in a IV. C ASE STUDY: R ESULTS creating a business plan for their idea and assisting them until This section presents the results from the requirements they launch the product. The secondary users are students elicitation that was performed by analyzing an early prototype in universities across the country. The tool would serve as of the Partneur online platform and in interview sessions with an educational tool in building a business plan for initiatives two of the founders. or student clubs encouraging entrepreneurship. Mentors are experienced individuals with several years of experience in the A. Stakeholder model field of Entrepreneurship. They voluntarily take the initiative In the requirements engineering domain, a stakeholder is to provide guidance to the teams and advise them in their commonly defined any individual, group or a business who key decisions. Educational institutions, Partners and Sponsors has a stake in the system, i.e, an entity who is affected by the provide visibility and support to Partneur. They assist in system and/or affects the system through some component [1], marketing efforts to gain more users and help in growing [28], [12]. But this doesn’t mean that every stakeholder is the platform with insights and/or monetary aid. Finally, Com- interested in the project’s success. For example, although petitors are other online platforms that provide support for legislators influence the way a company or system works, they creating a business plan from scratch. A few of Partneur’s are usually unaffected or little affected by the system’s success key competitors are liveplan.com, businessplanpro.com, and or failure. Stakeholders can be identified through iteratively planbuildr.com. However, Partneur are the only ones who analyzing the goals to deduce key role-players who influence focus especially on team building around a business plan in the system, inspecting the business and operational context of the making. the system under development, instantiating a generic refer- ence list, and so on. In general, stakeholders can be classified B. Goal model diagram based on their roles and function. A generic list of categorizing Goals are targets for achievement, which determine the stakeholders by their roles are: users, creators, developers, driving force behind the system. They help in establishing institutions etc. Based on their functions, stakeholders can a framework for the system. They define the high-level ob- be categorized into the following groups: Decision makers, jectives of the system and guide decisions at various levels Fig. 1. Stakeholders of Partneur within the enterprise [10], [32]. Goals are subdivided into three several Business goals (which are highlighted in blue). The categories: Business goals, Usage goals and System goals. business goals include: attracting possible investors to fund Business Goals are the key goals of the business that lay the the projects, impacting the Long Beach community with the foundation for other goals. They have a direct impact on the launch of these innovative projects, creating a reliable interface entire system and provide motivation for the system. Usage for users to connect and build these projects, providing a trans- Goals determine how the primary, secondary and tertiary users parent, financial model to users so that they know exactly what work with the system. They are related to the functional they are paying/signing up for, and finally aiding educational context of the system. System Goals explain how the system institutions and users by providing them Partneur as a learning is supposed to work to achieve the above goals. They are tool. system-related goals that target system characteristics [22]. The Usage goals (highlighted in yellow) tell us about what Each goal can be further decomposed into smaller sub the users can achieve with the system. By attracting investors goals. These sub goals ensure that certain pre-requirements (Business Goal), the users can network and make connections are met before moving on to achieving the larger goal. This with the investors and can create a pitch deck of their project helps in addressing issues and resolving conflicts during the to show them. Users can create innovative, impactful projects implementation of the system. Further, the goals are analyzed which will in turn benefit the Long Beach community at large. to see if they have a sustainable factor, i.e., does the goal bring Using the reliable interface of Partneur, users can connect with out sustainability in any of the five dimensions (individual, a team, discuss and share skills and information securely, and social, technical, economic and environmental). legally protect their project ideas. Transparency in the financial A goal model diagram is used to depict the decomposition of model can be achieved by having few economic variables goals into subgoals, and the respective interdepencies between for the membership pricing: i.e. the membership pricing may the goals. This forms the basis for early identification and depend only on a few key factors like number of projects etc. resolution of conflicts, and defining the rationale of a require- Users can learn and apply real-life skills in their projects and ment. In most cases, a Primary Goal is subdivided into several receive mentoring. This way, Partneur succeeds in providing Business goals which are further decomposed into Usage goals an online learning tool for individuals. followed by System goals. Further, every goal improves the The System goals (highlighted in green) are broad system- sustainability factor of the dimensions listed at the top of the related goals, which relate to the overall functioning of the sys- goal. tem. They include high availability the total system (includes The goal model diagram depicts the goal model for Partneur. website, security, privacy and mentoring), excellent system At the top, we have the primary goal of Partneur. This is the security to protect user’s information and privacy, and easy mission statement of Partneur which is to “formulate, build and navigation features which will enable the system to be a user- execute business ideas”. This primary goal is decomposed into friendly interface. Fig. 2. Goals of Partneur Usually, the parent goals and subgoals work toward im- proving a common sustainability dimension. For example, the Business goal of impacting the Long Beach community helps in expanding the Social dimension of sustainability by improving the community and standard of living. It also positively enhances the Environmental aspect of sustainability by launching projects which are aimed at being eco-friendly and bringing about a “green” change in the society. This can be followed by the Usage goal of connecting a team of entrepreneurs. It positively impacts the sustainability of the social dimension by bringing people closer in a community and creates an environment where people can work collectively to achieve a common goal. Lastly, the Usage goal can be achieved by having a user-friendly interface (which can be achieved by having an easy navigation amongst other things) and a high availability of the system. These goals enhance the technical aspect of sustainability by ensuring that the system functions according to the requirements set by the developers and/or expectations set by the users. C. UML use case overview diagram Use cases are used to represent a business function, process, or activity performed in the modeled business. A business actor represents a role played by some person or system external to the modeled business, and interacting with the business. A Fig. 3. Use case flow of Partneur business use case should produce a result of observable value to a business actor [22]. An adapted UML depiction of these use-cases (Fig. 3) outlines all the possible use-case scenarios primary user is an individual user, who is seeking to utilize of the primary, secondary and tertiary users of the system. the Partneur tool in bringing his business idea to life. He can Partneur has three types of end users: Individual users, choose to initiate a project or simply join an existing team. He Investors and Mentors. Each of these users are business actors takes the first step by creating an account with the website. to Partneur and play a particular role in the system. The Next, he can choose to create a project of his own and choose a Business model best suited to his idea. This is followed In addition to individual users, we also have students from by the Team Development process which includes connecting schools/educational institutions who are the secondary users with people to create a team. If an individual user doesn’t of Partneur. Thus, Partneur has partnerships with a few local choose to initiate a project, then he can request to join an schools/institutions who utilize Partneur as a learning tool to existing project. The Team Development phase is followed by enhance the teaching process. Next, we have the Mentors the Development phase. It includes Market Research, choosing who overlook the teams and projects and provide guidance a Financial Template, creating a Business plan and choosing throughout the process. Some Mentors might belong to an the Services required to develop the project. A Mentor is educational institution but not necessarily. Next, we have mo- a secondary user of the system who provides his valuable tivated, passionate individuals who have signed up and created insights and assists the team in making key decisions in the an account with Partneur. They may belong to an educational Development phase of one or more projects. Service providers institution, but not necessarily. Since these individuals usually are tertiary users of the system. They are not key business have little or no prior experience in entrepreneurship, they actors since they don’t create an account with the system and have concerns such as how to identify suitable partners, how are not personally involved with the project which the goal to obtain funding, and how to estimate operating costs. Further, of success. However, they do impact the system by providing these individuals form separate teams to create their projects. their services (such as Accounting, Website development etc.) Each team member has concerns like “I hope this team sticks to various teams who contact them for their services. Finally, together”, “I hope our ideas are not stolen” etc. Every team Investors are important business actors of the system. They are works on one or more projects. They create a Business model secondary users of the system who launch the various projects and pitch deck. Investors fund the project if they like the pitch after they are completed. First, they create an account with deck. Investors think about factors such as Does the project has Partneur. Next, investors choose certain criteria about the kind a high ROI, low risk etc. A legal team backs the project pitch of projects they would be interested in funding. And finally, deck to ensure that the Intellectual Property (IP) is protected. they select one or more project and help in launching them by After the investment in the project, the project proceeds to providing monetary funding. becoming a final product. The final product ends up having a positive effect on the community at large. D. System Vision as Rich Picture A system vision diagram is a joint vision of the system E. Sustainability Awareness Diagram (SuSAD) agreed by all stakeholders. One way we can create this big Now that we have a clear picture of the whole system, picture is through graphically depicting the entire system in its processes, stakeholders and motivation, we can combine a rich picture format. A rich picture is a holistic thinking our insights to create a sustainability awareness diagram of approach for a complex system with several stakeholders [22]. the system. This is a diagram which details the immediate, It consists of text, symbols, icons and thought bubbles to enabling and systemic effects of the entire system. A SusAD illustrate the main elements and relationships that need to diagram can be graphically represented in several forms. Here, be considered in trying to intervene in order to create some we have utilized a pentagon radar diagram. Each side of the improvement. It includes a broad view of the stakeholders, pentagon represents one of the sustainability dimensions. processes and elements of the system. The thought bubbles The diagram is split into three levels. At the innermost level, are queries/thoughts/ideas of the specific stakeholder in this the immediate effects of the system are listed, according to situation. A rich picture helps in understanding the complexity the dimensions of sustainability that they impact. Immediate of an entire situation. It points out relationships and connec- effects include the direct effects of the production, use and tions that we may otherwise miss. A rich picture helps to disposal of the software systems. The middle level and the open discussion and come to a broad, shared understanding of outermost level detail the enabling effects and systemic effects a situation. We have used icons from the sustainability library of the system. Enabling effects arise from a system’s appli- that was created at the ICT4S 2018 conference [31]. cation over time. This includes the opportunities to consume The system vision diagram (Fig. 4) depicts the system vision more or lesser resources amongst the other changes induced of Partneur in a rich picture format [17]. Firstly, let’s begin by the system. System effects represent the “persistent changes with the owners of Partneur. They overview and manage all observable at macro level”. the processes and key decisions of the system. They own the One way of making use of the contents of the SuSAD is Partneur website and are responsible for its overall functioning to connect this to sustainability patterns, which can be found and issues. The owners are usually concerned about issues in the Sustainability Pattern Catalogue (https://patternscatalog. such as: How to get more users? How to get more schools on herokuapp.com) [8]. Table 1 shows which patterns we have board with Partneur? How to achieve credibility of the system? identified as applicable for Partneur. How to manage legal issues? How to get more funding? In detail, these patterns are characterized by the following. Next, we have the team of IT Developers who develop the For details on examples from companies where these patterns code and database to build the website. They work together have been successfully applied, please see [8]. with the Support team to ensure that the system has a HR 2: Data Privacy and Security Policy — With the raise reliable, secure, user-friendly interface with high availability. of the Internet of Everything (IoE), people can now share Fig. 4. System Vision of Partneur Fig. 5. Sustainability Awareness Diagram of Partneur 1st order 2nd order 3rd order individual HR2: Data Pri- reuse materials into the manufacturing process, also known as vacy and Secu- circular economy. Second, reduce or eliminate the proportion rity Policy of toxic or harmful materials from the products. In order to social G3: Collaborate with peers be even more efficient, this strategy is most of the time com- technical ENV4: bined with the implementation of an end of life management Resource program which allows companies to directly refurbish, recycle Efficiency economic G5: or reuse the products they sold (see patterns CONS1). Transparency ENV4: Resource efficiency — To limit their resources’ environmental ENV3: Design consumption companies, and then reduce their environmental ecological products negative impacts, companies decided to set up initiatives to TABLE I economize different type of resources. Most of them decided PATTERNS FROM CSR CATALOGUE THAT CAN BE USED TO IMPROVE THE to focus on waste generation from office and water efficiency IMPACTS IDENTIFIED IN THE INDIVIDUAL CELLS OF THE S USTAINABILITY AWARENESS D IAGRAM . both from office and from operations. We can also notice that more than half of the companies decided to set up paper efficiency strategy, mainly by optimizing their printing policies. To maximize the impacts of this strategy, employees and access business or personal data from anywhere at any need to be fully aware with environmental issues [8]. time. Therefore, data privacy and especially security is a huge concern in the world, especially for the IT industry that is V. A NALYSIS AND D ISCUSSION at the basis of this IoE. To fight these issues, 75% of the This section analyses and discusses the results of the case companies established a Data Privacy statement where they study summarized in the above presented artifacts. explain how they use our data. These statements constantly evolve to meet the new regulations as we saw recently in A. Usability of artifacts & approach by the requirements Europe. Moreover, since the most private data is the one that engineers is unreachable, companies also include Data Security in the In creating each diagram for the case study, we found a fresh conception of their products or services that allows them to perspective in understanding the system. It helped us get a increase the trust of their customer. thorough big picture of the stakeholders, functions, processes, G3: Collaborate with peers — According to the UN, collab- goals, possible use-case scenarios and sustainable dimensions oration is one of the keys to meet Sustainable Development underlying in the system. Goals. By participating to the creation of laws or standards While creating the Stakeholder model diagram, we started companies, most of the companies try to increase their co- by categorizing the possible stakeholders of the system into operativity. Moreover, most of the companies also decided to three groups: Individual, Business and Systemic. Each group go further than local regulation in different places where they represents an increasingly larger set of people. Individual operate, especially when they are in the third world. These stakeholders are single body stakeholders who play a role in initiatives can lead to an international recognition in specific the system such as an owner or an individual user. Business fields for companies, and even sometimes to be defined as stakeholders are enterprises or organizations that play a role “an example to follow”. Finally, local and internal cooperation in the system for example competitor businesses, educational is also very important this is why more than half of the institutions etc. System stakeholders are larger, organizational companies implemented stakeholder engagement mechanisms bodies that play a role in the system for example the local to define their own sustainability objectives (see pattern G1). community, environment etc. It was important to remember G5: Transparency — Publish sustainability data to the that these stakeholders can be affected directly or indirectly by public audience and make pricing transparent. All of the 20 the system. Not all stakeholders are direct users of the system. companies investigated in [8] provided environmental data We derived the list of stakeholders by iteratively assessing such as CO2 emissions, electricity consumption, resources the generic lists of stakeholders based on their functions consumption, etc. They also published their different dona- and roles and critically analyzing the possible stakeholders tions, and few even reported their political contributions or that could exist in the three categories (Individuals, Business, stated that they weren’t involved in it. On one hand, this Systemic). In the future, it is planned to expand the stakeholder practice, allows companies to keep a track on the level of analysis to include other sustainability actors (environment, advancement of their different sustainability strategies and give future generations etc.). the possibility for public institutions to confirm it. On the other Next, we assessed each of the different stakeholders from hand, they can inform customers about their different impacts the different ways in which they are categorized and derived on sustainability. a list of goals specific to each stakeholder. Then we organized ENV3: Design ecological products — In order to reduce the goals into a hierarchy of three categories, Business goals, their environmental impacts, companies decided to design Usage goals and System goals, based on their overall objective. more ecological products regarding the materials used to Business goals are usually set by the Owners, Advisors, build them. This is concretely translated in two ways. First, higher level management etc. Usage goals are the standards or expectations set by the direct users of the system. System additional insight from the analysis that can be beneficial to goals are goals about the system-characteristics which are set their company going forward. by the development team to ensure the success of system. The visual library used for the system vision had been Collectively, these goals work together to ensure the success developed at ICT4S 2018 [31]. It was perceived as a useful of the previous higher hierarchy of goals and ultimately the and adequate set of illustration icons by both the requirements Primary goal or the mission of the system. Finally, for each engineers and the start-up founders. goal, we noted which dimensions of sustainability satisfied or improved by it. We noticed that these dimensions of C. Lessons Learned sustainability are common for related goals in the hierarchical Looking back on the analysis of the research, there are a order, i.e., parent and child goals collectively improve common couple of ways in which we could optimize the research to im- dimensions of sustainability. Further, every goal higher up in prove the preciseness of details, results and impact of this case the hierarchical order (i.e., Business and Usage goals) must study. An alternative way to initiate the sustainability analysis have more than one subgoals. This ensured the cohesiveness part of the research from scratch would be by interviewing the of the goals of the entire system. founders of Partneur about their perspectives of sustainability, We followed this by creating a UML use case diagram. their sustainability analysis for the system thus far and their Out of the list of stakeholders, we focused on the direct future goals. In our case we had a general interview and users of the system. These are the primary, secondary and then some document analysis, which also led to a number tertiary users of the system. We mapped out all the possible of insights but it would be interesting to compare the two scenarios and actions they can perform in the system and ways of approaching the creation of the sustainability analysis created a consolidated UML diagram. This diagram depicts and understand which way is potentially more effective and/or the relations between the direct users and their action flow efficient. in the system. Next, we created the Rich picture diagram to After eliciting the requirements and concepts from the provide a big picture which is inclusive of all the stakeholders information given to us, in a replication of this study we in the system. It details all the processes occurring in the could equally focus on drafting a clearer picture of the system system and interdependencies between the stakeholders of vision in direct iterative collaboration with the founders and the system. Every stakeholder can impact several processes. brainstorming the impacts of the system instead of creating Further, to enhance the big picture, the concerns of every a draft and checking with them. This could be enhanced stakeholder are represented in their thought bubbles. This with several in-depth conversations about the details of the shows us how different stakeholders have different objectives processes, the motivations of the stakeholders and creating from the system. solutions for the concerns of every stakeholder. Finally, we consolidate all the insights and information from In this exploratory case study we have only one system the above assessment of the system and produce the SusAD under development and therefore there was no ground to diagram. We critically assessed the various stakeholders, their perform any type of quantitative analysis, but once we can goals, interdependencies and actions to achieve these goals in replicate this study with several companies [2], it would be the entire system to derive the possible immediate, enabling interesting to reuse rating scales for usability and usefulness and structural effects it creates. We classified the effects based from previous work in the evaluation of artifact-based require- on the dimensions of sustainability they impact. This provided ments engineering [20], [16], [19]. us with the overall impacts created by the system and the underlying process behind them. This helped in identifying the D. Limitations and Threats to Validity ways in which we can optimize the processes of the system and update the goals to make it more sustainable and impactful. The main limitation of the approach, i.e., what the approach is suitable and intended for and what exceeds that, is that it B. Usefulness of the results for the start-up founders looks at a given scenario or situation in a development setting We elicited and structured information under the dimensions and extrapolates the impacts that could potentially occur if the of sustainability that the founder team had not previously system was going to be wildly successful. It does currently not thought about in that manner. Their perspective was more include the support for looking at alternative scenarios, which, informed by an economics background and therefore applying in the case of Partneur, could involve taking a closer look at a software and systems engineering approach brought new circular economy informed models [11], [30] or regenerative insights. In addition, the sustainability awareness diagram gave approaches [14]. more of a long-term view than the planning horizon a start-up The threats to validity include that of the three researchers would usually analyze. While resources in terms of working working on the analysis, two were only recently introduced to power and time are limited, just a discussion of 2 hours the techniques that were applied. Furthermore, we could only brought a more than adequate amount of insights for the time interview two of the four founders of Partneur, but the other invested in the task. For example, the founders saw some good two were looped in by email to confirm preliminary results points to highlight sustainable businesses on their platform. and double-check we had not misunderstood anything in our All together they gave us the feedback that they gained some conversations. VI. C ONCLUSIONS [12] Martin Glinz and Roel J. Wieringa. Guest editors’ introduction: Stakeholders in requirements engineering. IEEE Software, 24(2):18–20, Most businesses and startups today depend on or are facili- 2007. tated by software. This paper showed a case study that employs [13] Lorenz M Hilty and Bernard Aebischer. Ict for sustainability: An requirements engineering for sustainability and a sustainability emerging research field. In ICT Innovations for Sustainability, pages 3–36. Springer, 2015. awareness diagram to help in the long-term estimation of [14] Alexandre Joyce and Raymond L Paquin. The triple layered business sustainability impacts. 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In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference to resolve conflicts and find solutions for stakeholder concerns, on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE 2011), as well as explore the motivations of the stakeholders. The pages 104–113. Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), 2011. [17] Andrew Monk and Steve Howard. Methods & tools: the rich picture: a sustainability awareness diagram helps to get better awareness tool for reasoning about work context. interactions, 5(2):21–30, 1998. for the dimensions of sustainability impacted by the system. [18] Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur. Business model generation: a In order to further this research, we plan to observe Partneur handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers. John Wiley & Sons, 2010. and follow them through their 5-year plan. Questions of [19] B. Penzenstadler, D. Mendez Fernandez, and J. Eckhardt. 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