The Quest For Sustainable Business

In January 2010, author, academic and social entrepreneur Dr Wayne Visser set off on a nine-month, 20-country "quest" to talk to entrepreneurs, business leaders and innovators and learn about how companies in all parts of the world can and are helping to tackle the world's most pressing social and environmental problems. His aim was to explore the many varieties of global approaches to sustainable business practices first-hand and to share some of the most innovative global examples.The result is this treasure trove of a book, full of stories, ideas, links to more than 100 video interviews, best practices and tools for making sustainable business work in a myriad of different contexts, cultures and settings. Besides sharing insights from his 2010 "CSR Quest World Tour", the author captures his professional experiences and the evolution of sustainable business over the past 20 years.The path begins in Africa and winds its way through Asia, North America, Europe, Australasia and Latin America. The author shares what he has learned in encounters with mega-corporations and small farmers, and conversations with CEOs and social entrepreneurs. There are facts and figures about world trends, and interviews with thought leaders and activists. This is a tale that consciously weaves the personal and the professional, mixing anecdotes and case studies. It looks outwards and reflects inwards, and is both autobiography and the life story of a global movement.

Quest for Sustainable Society discusses numerous efforts and activities for the quest of sustainable society. This book is organized into four parts encompassing 13 chapters. The first part deals with the biological, genetic, cultural, and technological diversity of the sustainable society. This part also examines the social and economic implications of widespread conversion to biomass-based fuels. The next two parts look into the qualitative components and institutional modifications for a sustainable society. These chapters discuss the role of politics, ecosystem education, and business organizations in the quest for a sustainable society. The fourth part presents two case studies that demonstrate the consequences of sustainable growth. This book will prove useful to sociologists, economists, and researchers.

When thinking about lowering or changing consumption to lower carbon footprints, the obvious offenders come easily to mind: petroleum and petroleum products, paper and plastic, even food, but not clothes. When people evaluate ways to lower their personal carbon footprint by changing purchasing habits, they are bombarded with information to avoid petroleum and petroleum products, plastics, paper, even food, but not clothes. Most consumers do not think of clothes as a source of environmental damage. Yet, clothes are made with petroleum products through chemically-laden industrial processes that generate significant pollution. The fashion industry is among the largest organic water polluters in the world, accounting for significant greenhouse gas emissions and generating massive amounts of waste as a function of the frequent discarding of used clothing. In the Dirty Side of the Garment Industry: Fast Fashion and Its Negative Impact on Environment and Society, author Nikolay Anguelov exposed the ecological damage from the fast-fashion business model. In this book, The Sustainable Fashion Quest: Innovations in Business and Policy, the author takes this one step further by focusing on solutions. This book uses the familiar (yet complex) industry of fashion as a lens to examine how business pressures and national and international policies can have both positive and negative social and ecological impacts. It provides an analysis of extant and emerging policies to address the divergence in the ongoing quest to maximize economic development and minimize the social costs of the industrialization process. It also examines emerging technologies and innovative business models that have the potential to revolutionize how fashion is perceived, manufactured, and consumed. This book begins with an introductory letter that outlines the social and environmental issues facing the fashion industry, as well as emphasizing the seriousness and urgency of addressing them. Each chapter then focuses on a major aspect of the industry with an increasing emphasis on policy. The chapters outline the impact of global-level and business-level decisions on the industry’s success, its social and environmental impact, and its relationship to consumers. The goal of the book is to define that transition, explain its challenges, and educate readers on the possibilities to become powerful drivers of change through their professional actions and their personal behavior as consumers. While the book specifically analyzes the fashion industry, it also explains the implications for other industrial sectors. It uses a product everyone is familiar with (we all buy clothes, after all) to examine the decisions, impacts, and policies shaping the industry behind the scenes. The linkages are applicable to other fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) business sectors, such as consumer electronics, which are starting to face sustainability criticism for relying on a business model of promoting a high frequency of repeat purchasing.

Reimagining business models is a tall order for any management team, and especially so in today’s business landscape of continual disruptive change. Having examined hundreds of businesses over the course of their research, the BCG Henderson Institute has developed a systematic approach for reimagining business models for economic and social sustainability, creating new modes of differentiation and advantage, embedding societal value into products and services, managing new performance measures, and reshaping business ecosystems to support these initiatives. This book explores the why, what, and how of sustainable business model innovation (SBM-I) – a new method by which corporations can optimize for both business and social value using their core businesses to deliver the financial returns expected by their owners and, in tandem, to help society meet its most significant challenges. It details the SBM-I innovation cycle linking to value creation and scaled transformation, and expands the application of SBM-I to sustainable business ecosystems and corporate lead sustainability alliances. Sustainable Business Model Innovation offers inspiration and guidance to create more competitive and sustainable companies. Your company's future, our environment, and society depend on doing so.

Reimagining business models is a tall order for any management team, and especially so in today’s business landscape of continual disruptive change. Having examined hundreds of businesses over the course of their research, the BCG Henderson Institute has developed a systematic approach for reimagining business models for economic and social sustainability, creating new modes of differentiation and advantage, embedding societal value into products and services, managing new performance measures, and reshaping business ecosystems to support these initiatives. This book explores the why, what, and how of sustainable business model innovation (SBM-I) – a new method by which corporations can optimize for both business and social value using their core businesses to deliver the financial returns expected by their owners and, in tandem, to help society meet its most significant challenges. It details the SBM-I innovation cycle linking to value creation and scaled transformation, and expands the application of SBM-I to sustainable business ecosystems and corporate lead sustainability alliances. Sustainable Business Model Innovation offers inspiration and guidance to create more competitive and sustainable companies. Your company's future, our environment, and society depend on doing so.

Interconnecting the concepts of sustainability, innovation and transformation, this book explains how organizations have successfully transformed themselves and wider society to foster a more sustainable future, and identifies the difficulties and challenges along the way. Part of the Principle of Responsible Management Education (PRME) series, the book promotes a strong voice for meeting sustainability challenges for transformative change in a globalized world through business education and practice. A transition to a more sustainable way of doing business can only be attained by combining technology with profound system innovations and lifestyle changes. The chapters in the book, each written by a strong and well-recognized team of researchers in the field, open up the discussion about a new partnership between sustainability, innovation, and transformation that includes the global society (big world), the biosphere (small planet), and also requires a deep mind shift. The book presents cases from business (including Ikea and Eataly) and other service networks including the Base of the Pyramid (BoP), and illustrates how these organizations have transformed themselves for a sustainable future. The research perspectives are macro (policies and legislation), meso (institutional practices) and micro (business practices and individual behavior). This book is where research meets real-world business and societal practice. The chapters are grounded in business research, specifically the interdependencies between sustainability, innovation, and transformation, which makes for a robust basis for describing, explaining, and understanding the complex challenges faced by business and society in the 21st century. The book is intended for graduate- and postgraduate-level students and executive education with implications for practitioners. Furthermore, it contributes to multidisciplinary research in the field of interaction between business and society with a view to extending the firm-centric view to encompass a broader, systemic, and dynamic understanding of business and societal transformation.

Taking the business model as point of departure, this open access book explores how companies and organizations can contribute to a more sustainable future by designing innovative models that are both sustainable and profitable. Based upon years of research, it draws together theoretical foundations and existing literature on the topic of sustainable business alongside case studies and practical solutions. After examining the theoretical foundations of sustainable business model innovation, the authors present their own framework – RESTART. Consisting of seven factors, this framework can be the basis for restarting any business model. The final section outlines a research agenda for sustainable business informed by the perspectives and frameworks put forward in this book.