Green Initiatives For Business Sustainability And Value Creation

Sustainability has become an unavoidable topic in modern society. In order for sustainable development to be fully achieved, it must be integrated into the planning and measurement systems of business enterprises. Green Initiatives for Business Sustainability and Value Creation is an essential reference source including the most recent scholarly research on the development and application of green business models for contemporary organizations, with a focus on possible contexts and constructs of closed loop supply chain management. Featuring extensive coverage on topics such as consumption behavior, political economy, and structural modeling, this book is ideally designed for academicians, researchers, and professionals seeking current research on the importance of strategic green business practices.

This book provides insight into the Life Cycle Management (LCM) concept and the progress in its implementation. LCM is a management concept applied in industrial and service sectors to improve products and services, while enhancing the overall sustainability performance of business and its value chains. In this regard, LCM is an opportunity to differentiate through sustainability performance on the market place, working with all departments of a company such as research and development, procurement and marketing, and to enhance the collaboration with stakeholders along a company’s value chain. LCM is used beyond short-term business success and aims at long-term achievements by minimizing environmental and socio-economic burden, while maximizing economic and social value.

A small but influential group of mainstream global industry leaders are now reinventing the role of business in society. They are shifting the focus away from minimizing negative impacts to offering new solutions to global problems that the public sector has been unable to tackle alone. In this new competitive environment, societal challenges such as climate change or the alleviation of global poverty are not only risks, but huge business opportunities, not only for niche players, but for mainstream business. These leaders are creating "Sustainable Value". They are creating it through the provision of value to both their shareholders and their stakeholders – an ever-growing list of diverse constituents impacted by the social, environmental, and financial performance of global business. In short, they are doing well by doing good. In this outstanding book, Chris Laszlo defines, illustrates, and shows how business can action 'Sustainable Value' in three profoundly different ways. First, a management fable looks at the experiences of a dynamic business leader as she grapples with the new business realities of managing stakeholder, as well as shareholder pressures. Second, with the real thing – inside stories from some of the largest corporations in the world that are successfully integrating sustainability into their core activities, not only from a sense of moral correctness, but because it makes good business sense. And, finally, with frameworks, tools, and methods that will make sustainable value creation concrete for business practitioners everywhere. This book is a masterful synthesis – part novel and part executive briefing – a refreshing kind of prophetic pragmatism, helping leaders anticipate and see the future in the context of the actual. In Sustainable Value Chris Laszlo speaks with resounding clarity to the living challenges, the real dilemmas, and haunting questions of CEOs everywhere.

Environmental sustainability creates both tremendous business opportunities and formidable threats to established companies across virtually all industry sectors. Yet many companies tackle the issue in a superficial or passive way, rather than considering fundamental changes to their existing business models. By ignoring the opportunities of Green Business Model Transformations, companies exclude themselves from a large variety of potential means to create economic value. In addition to ordinary product and process innovations, they can change “the rules of the game” within an industry towards environmental sustainability. Green Business Model Transformations, however, are challenging ventures: New, green business models with all their uncertainties and inherent complex systemic characteristics are difficult to design, assess, and implement successfully, particularly in the context of established companies that often entail complex structures and considerable inertia. As a result, there is a great need for guidance in management practice. This publication addresses this need with a general approach to Managing Green Business Model Transformations that is based on a broad theoretical foundation, illustrated by many real-world examples from various industry sectors.

This book introduces the integrated management concept of "Sustainable Value Creation", which delivers sustainability ‘inside-out’ from the core business. It is based on the premise that sustainability can provide a platform for growth, if it is implemented in a company’s products, services and supply chains (combined also known as the 'Value Chain'). Managing the Value Chain from the outset with a sustainability mindset subsequently allows profitable economical, ecological and societal growth. It combines the need for increased sustainability and its implementation in the operations of a company. The book addresses the following issues: How do economic, environmental and societal factors impact the value-creation process of a company? What requirements and expectations need to be met to balance economic, ecologic and societal value creation? What are the building blocks and measures that can be utilized on the journey towards building a sustainable value chain? What benefits can be achieved through sustainable value chains? What are the practical examples of sustainable value chains in leading companies that can inspire others to follow? The book includes contributions from the following organisations and companies: Beiersdorf, SAP, Klenk und Hoursch, VAUDE, Infineon Technologies, Independent Capital Management, BASF, Nanogate, the Federal German Council for Sustainable Development, Henkel, Symrise, shared.value.chain, Siemens, Fairphone and Thin Air Factory

A hyperconnected, constantly evolving world has emerged. A world where people (internet of people), things (internet of things), and data (internet of data) are linked together, shaping the global economy while demanding new, innovative approaches for value creation. The era of hyper-connectivity is no longer characterized by centralized firm-centric business structures and traditional intra-firm and inter-firm processes. Open, distributed ecosystemic formations have started to emerge, utilizing cutting edge technologies to harness the collective power, co-creation ability, and intelligence of the crowd, the data, and the environment in an open participatory value co-creation mode. However, the question has become whether the frameworks, models, and tools that organizations use to create value will remain the same in the new business environment and within the organizations themselves. Existing literature on ecosystems, business models, and business model innovation are starting to examine these aspects. Emerging Ecosystem-Centric Business Models for Sustainable Value Creation explores emerging technology-enabled ecosystems and ecosystem-centric business models in theory and practice, from a business and technological perspective, and in a range of industrial settings, aiming to contribute to the existing knowledge of innovative technology-advanced ecosystems and business models, facilitating their design, implementation, and sustainable value creation. It examines the dynamics of this technology-powered revolution and how it is influencing the foundations of value creation and business modeling in novel ecosystemic formations across the HMD triangle: human, machine, and data. The target audience of this book is researchers and professionals in the fields of innovation, business, and strategy as well as computer science and information technology, along with managers, executives, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students interested in new ways to create value in emerging and future ecosystems via innovative ecosystem-centric business models and strategies.

This edited volume presents the research results of the Collaborative Research Center 1026 “Sustainable manufacturing - shaping global value creation”. The book aims at providing a reference guide of sustainable manufacturing for researchers, describing methodologies for development of sustainable manufacturing solutions. The volume is structured in four chapters covering the following topics: sustainable manufacturing technology, sustainable product development, sustainable value creation networks and systematic change towards sustainable manufacturing. The target audience comprises both researchers and practitioners in the field of sustainable manufacturing, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

This volume discusses how different geographical spaces can enhance or hinder the capacity of a variety of organizational settings to achieve economic value creation in the pursuit of sustainable regional development. In order to provide the most comprehensive picture of new sources of value creation for sustainable transitions, the book collects contributions that tackle this issue from a variety of perspectives, and adopts a systemic approach where macro, meso and micro-levels of analysis are intertwined in three sections. This multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach comes from scholars operating in the fields of planning, economic geography, social entrepreneurship and organizational management. The first section of the book adopts a macro-level approach linking sustainability to the regional development theme, and addresses how organizations work between different social interests to produce outcomes not previously realized. The second section of the book focuses on the spatial dimensions of sustainable development, with particular clusters, industrial districts and regions considered as relevant units of analysis (meso-level analysis). The third section of the book is dedicated to a micro-level approach, illustrating how to drive social entrepreneurship activities, which are based upon sustainable business models centered in the creation of a shared value. The book is geared towards scholars working on sustainable development issues intersecting the disciplines of regional studies, economic geography and management, and will appeal to geographers and researchers in economic development, business innovation, and sustainability transitions.