The Sustainability Imperative
As organizations struggle to define a strategy that balances purpose and profit, opportunities are increasingly emerging to take the lead in sustainability initiatives. Front-line advances in areas such as net-zero emissions, AI-powered solutions for the underserved, precision agriculture, digital healthcare, and more are delivering business benefits, while simultaneously contributing to the realization of the UN’s 17 SDGs. We provide the expert thinking, debate, and guidance to help your organization reposition and transform in the era of sustainability.
Recently Published
Drawing on the results of a recent ADL survey, this two-part Advisor series considers how companies are progressing in embedding sustainability into their strategy, governance, and organization. Here in Part I, we look at two of the main challenges that companies face and how they can be best overcome.
This Advisor explores 12 key leverage points for change within the New York City Waste system. Grouping the leverage points into broader buckets (low, medium, and high impact) gives us an uncomplicated categorization of solutions that tells us how much energy we should invest in supporting or opposing that solution.
This Advisor presents a mini case study to highlight the conflicts between market-based social activism and the traditional business model.
In this on-demand webinar, Cutter Expert Helen Pukszta explores how drone technology is being adapted and applied to contribute to the achievement of environmental sustainability goals, while also creating economic value.
This Advisor commemorates World Environment Day 2022 by looking at the potential impact of the climate crisis and identifying promising options to address the worsening environmental problem.
Cigdem Z. Gurgur describes how a blockchain-based Internet of Things (IoT) can push market systems toward sustainability. Blockchain offers new opportunities relevant to systems design. It connects stakeholders with multiple sources of verified information, generates a richer informational landscape for executing business processes, and enables secure transactions between untrusted actors. Trusted networks can reduce transaction costs, simplify processes, and reduce resource intensity compared to traditional transaction technologies. Gurgur explores the conditions needed to facilitate blockchain deployment in the next generation of supply chains, specifically through IoT technologies that have attractive applications for creating, monitoring, and enforcing sustainability standards.
Rohit Nishant and Thompson S.H. Teo discuss how to limit the negative impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption by using concepts from both regenerative and doughnut economics. These two approaches seek to reconstruct economic systems so they operate within the sustainable operating limits of natural systems. Pointing out that AI adoption threatens to exceed sustainable boundaries by increasing aggregate demand for energy and new materials, Nishant and Teo put forth a 3Rs framework with which AI adopters can keep the impacts of AI within sustainable boundaries.
Corporate innovation often produces severe, unintended social consequences. Even as innovation creates value for a firm, it can destroy value within other systems. Here, the authors propose that companies move away from the traditional innovation model focused on the firm to a systems innovation model focused on the firm and its products in relation to other systems.