The Next Phase of Business Sustainability

Stanford Social Innovation Review Dec 26, 2018
This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
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The Next Phase of Business Sustainability

Giving Compass’ Take:

• As Stanford Social Innovation Review writes, businesses are now collaborating to create a sustainable market by spurring a transformative process themselves.

• This goes beyond Corporate Social Responsibility, as it speaks to a more embedded strategy within the private sector. How might funders work with leaders across sectors in this vein?

• Here’s more on growing and rethinking business trends through B Corporations.

Business sustainability has come a long way. From the dawn of the modern environmental movement and the establishment of environmental regulations in the 1970s, it has become a strategic concern driven by market forces. Today, more than 90 percent of CEOs state that sustainability is important to their company’s success, and companies develop sustainability strategies, market sustainable products and services, create positions such as chief sustainability officer, and publish sustainability reports for consumers, investors, activists, and the public at large.

This trend will not abate anytime soon. Surveys show that 88 percent of business school students think that learning about social and environmental issues in business is a priority, and 67 percent want to incorporate environmental sustainability into their future jobs. To meet this demand, the percentage of business schools that require students to take a course dedicated to business and society increased from 34 percent in 2001 to 79 percent in 2011, and specific academic programs on business sustainability can now be found in 46 percent of the top 100 US master of business administration (MBA) programs.

Read the full article about business sustainability by Andrew J. Hoffman at Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Since you are interested in Corp Giving and CSR, have you read these selections from Giving Compass related to impact giving and Corp Giving and CSR?

  • This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
    Click here for more.
    The Promise of Private Sector Grants in an Impact Investing World

    Giving Compass' Take: • KPMG East Africa’s International Development Advisory Services (IDAS) firm helps rally impact investors and development finance institutions to invest private finance grants in the development of Africa.  •  Will the future of development work rely on blended and private finance models?  • Read about where impact investing will go next.  Enough of the arguments about the trade-off between profit and impact. Impact investors now have a “trade-on” opportunity, says Arif Naqvi, founder of the global investment group Abraaj. Naqvi coined the term at the UN General Assembly in September, declaring that investors can improve financial returns by creating social value. To achieve SDG 1—ending poverty in all its forms everywhere—we have to find a way to help people with low incomes, who live in high-risk countries, small markets, or remote areas with low population densities and weak infrastructure, where it is still very hard to make money. That may seem like good news in light of the $5 trillion to $7 trillion annual Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) financing bill the international aid world hopes to meet with private sector investment. And yet there’s one important problem: Most poor people live in places where investors won’t go. We built a wide network of impact investors and development finance institutions that have completed successful deals with the companies we work with, but feedback from the investors suggested that most of the companies in the portfolio were “nearly uninvestable.” Many were small or had a small market size, or had operations in high-risk or post-conflict states. So how do we reach people in the dozens of other countries and thousands of communities where many investors won’t go? We think private-sector development grants still have several essential roles to play: Driving coherent development Working with “uninvestable companies”  Working in frontier markets Paying for the sunk early-stage costs of innovation and market entry Leveraging blended finance at the right time in the right way Kickstart business development service markets Read the full article on private sector grants   by Rachel Keeler at Stanford Social Innovation Review

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