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Social Responsibility P. 4

Page 8 of 12

  • How Fast Can Innovations Get Big?

    Energy sector innovation faces an important hurdle, according to MIT's Ernest Moniz. How do we reconcile the cultural mismatch between innovators and the establishment?

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  • How SAP Made the Business Case for Sustainability

    For more than a decade, Peter Graf, a computer scientist by training (Ph.D. in artificial intelligence), has focused on marketing at SAP, the business management software company. Since March 2009, Graf has had a new role: as SAP's first-ever chief sustainability officer for the company leading a global team that oversees all sustainability-related initiatives, from the creation of solutions that enable sustainable business processes for SAP customers to SAP's own sustainability operations, including key social, economic and environmental programs. Graf's first task as an inaugural CSO was one of perception. "I had to be very careful not to come across as a marketing show," he says. "That means when we talk externally, the initial conversation is all about SAP as a role model." Once SAP established their credibility based on their own initiatives and metrics, using their own systems, they were able to communicate to customers that they too could reach their sustainability goals using SAP's systems. Graf's second, and bigger task, was to grapple with internal corporate strategy. He had to make the business case for sustainability-driven actions -- and the case for trying to build SAP into a sustainability role model -- to SAP's own board of directors. His case was built on compliance, resource productivity, market opportunity, energizing the work force, and sustaining a business model. In this interview, Graf discusses how he made the sustainability case internally, what the payoffs have been and how SAP customers have -- and haven't -- responded.

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  • How Sustainability Fuels Design Innovation

    There’s an alarmist view of sustainable design that tilts toward the all-or-nothing. But it’s not the best path, says new-product design expert Steven Eppinger. When it comes to the practice of what Eppinger calls “design for environment,” he rejects the radical and argues for the incremental. For one thing, allor- nothing isn’t an approach businesses are especially good at; it takes too long, and fails too often. For another, the sum of continuous incrementalism is likely, he says, to carry designs further toward the no-impact outcomes everyone desires. Plus, there’s a method to it. It can be learned. The secret is to focus on materials. In this MIT SMR Sustainability Interview, Eppinger addresses the question of how environmental concerns can drive product design and innovation. Among his main points: 1) Design and product innovation for environmental sustainability should be framed as a materials problem; 2) How much material is used is less important than what material is used; 3) Don’t try to eliminate environmental impacts all at once. Try to get a little better each time you design any product.

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  • How to Do Well and Do Good

    Some companies have discovered that a commitment to tackling societal problems can lead to high performance and profits. It can help strengthen a company in the eyes of its customer base, its employee base and the general public. Technology has made information about a company's behavior anywhere in the world more readily available. If companies take a proactive approach, they can turn this increased consumer awareness into a benefit. Rosabeth Moss Kanter explores how companies like Proctor & Gamble, Starbucks and Diageo thought about societal benefits and created new products to support them.

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  • Why Size Matters

    In an interview that is part of SMR’s ongoing series on the business of sustainability, MIT’s Ernest Moniz, the director of the MIT Energy Initiative, explains why blending big-company culture with entrepreneurial innovation is the challenge that leaders must learn to meet. According to Moniz, large energy companies are the ones that have the capacity in terms of resources to scale up new technologies to impact climate change in a relatively short period of time. But to do so they need to be both “big and nimble.” “The number one overarching issue, which does pose business opportunity, business risk, and a need to rethink business models, is carbon constraints,” says Moniz. “As you know, 85 percent of our energy is fossil fuel. Fossil fuel equals carbon. Controlling carbon goes to the very core of the way we currently supply energy.” There are multiple strategies for dealing with innovation in a carbon-constrained world, including mergers and acquisitions, and investments in research. But the innovation culture is not natural to energy companies; until now they have been rewarded for reliability, not innovation. Cultivating an open mind, dealing with uncertainty, and balancing competing requirements necessary for innovation ultimately comes down to the judgment of senior executives.

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  • The Change Leadership Sustainability Demands

    Sustainability initiatives have three stages, each requiring differing organizational capabilities.

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  • The Four-Point Supply Chain Checklist: How Sustainability Creates Opportunity

    Supply chain managers can impact sustainability in areas such as packaging and transportation.

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  • 8 Reasons (You Never Thought Of) That Sustainability Will Change Management

    MIT Sloan Management Review's first annual Business of Sustainability survey revealed much about what executives are thinking and doing about sustainability-driven concerns right now--as well as what's impeding their attempts both to capture opportunities and defend against threats. The most widely credited leading thinkers at the sustainability and management intersection, though, wanted to explore something else: the ways that many fundamental management and strategy practices will be transformed by the pressures that sustainability issues are already bringing to bear. This article identifies eight significant ways that current management expectations and practices will be affected by growing societal and economic understanding about sustainability. Among them: how labor productivity can be dramatically increased by sustainably designed workplaces; how companies "bump into" sustainability-related choices, even when they don't look for them; how a company's sustainability profile will become a proxy for the organization's overall management quality; how innovation results are improved by pursuit of sustainability-related outcomes; how sustainability efforts within an organization lead to more productive collaboration across typical organizational silos; and how transparency and trustworthiness will become increasingly consequential to competitive success.

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  • Does Sustainability Change the Talent Equation?

    When it comes to tapping into the passions of employees, the opportunities and threats that sustainability presents are two sides of the same coin.

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  • Long-Viewed, See-Through, Collaborative and Retooled

    As sustainability-related pressures change the competitive landscape, what kinds of capabilities and characteristics will that landscape demand of companies that aim to thrive? Here's what Business of Sustainability Survey respondents and sustainability thought leaders say.

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