Sustainable business outlook

The last two weeks I have spent many hours on conferences listening to some great speeches on how to implement sustainability in business. First out was a conference called Sustainable Business Outlook where Nordic companies presented their best practices.

Most of them focused on green business like recycling and the energy savings of green buildings or new products but some speeches even covered the social aspect of sustainability. SCA, a global hygiene and paper company, for example invested money in educating 5000 nurses in China on how to handle incontinence and break taboos on this disease. The company also sells small packages of hygiene products in developing countries to enable people with low income to buy them – an approach in sharp contrast to the European and American concept with its big packages lasting for several weeks in favor of reduced transportation costs for consumers.

Sustainability can be accomplished in many ways and it is extremely important to embed it throughout organizations to drive efficiencies, cost savings and differentiation in markets through innovation. So after showing some best practices from the industry it was Accenture`s turn to present a global study on how to transform sustainability into value creation for stakeholders.

The most challenging part of the equation is how to accomplish a high Human Development Index and a low Ecological footprint or to put it this way: how can the product of number of people, GDP per person and the use of resources be minimized? Accenture conducted a survey among 50 CEOs and over 50 C-level executives called Vision 2050 and asked three questions: 1. What does a sustainable world look like? 2. How can we realize it? 3. What roles can business play to ensure more rapid progress towards this world? The complete report can be found on Accenture`s homepage. I just want to name a few results: implement sustainability in all areas of your business from strategy, branding, marketing and business development to operations and governance. Accomplish resource efficiency and take control over true costs like carbon and water. Put incentives on sustainable innovations and understand the role of mobile telecommunication in the growing markets like Africa, Latin America and Asia. Current value can be created by innovation and productivity gains whereas future value can be created by building tangible assets like marketing/branding and by good risk management. According to 44% of the CEOs it will take 5-10 years to embed sustainability into core business. This is pretty soon.

One group who already has incorporated sustainability is the wide range of social entrepreneurs. This is what my second conference was about called “The social entrepreneur as a transformer of the society”. Community Interest companies are, according to Wikipedia, companies who are designed for social enterprises that want to use their profits for the public good. Today many small businesses are started to change behaviors in society by hacking existing structures (for example Grameen bank) compared to former times where different social initiatives were started, for example Greenpeace or WWF. The conference provided a first glance on how social enterprises could be started and how social work could be conducted. One of the challenges that these social entrepreneurs faced was how to combine sustainability and profitability. One entrepreneur pointed out that a high form of transparency helped to overcome this gap.

By the way, in the mid of June Stockholm will be the host of the ICSB-conference titled “Back to the Future – changes in perspective of global entrepreneurship and innovation” with a long list of distinguished speakers and interesting sessions like Creative Environments, Globalization and its impact on Entrepreneurship, Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Innovation (www.icsb2011.org).