Recent Articles
Aviation Industry Sets its Sights on Biofuel as the Next Jetsetter
by Jennifer Chin
Most of us don’t think twice about air travel. We hop on flights that take us to the next state, across the country, and around the world because our jobs and vacation plans demand it. The FAA estimates that air passengers traveled 771,100,000,000 miles last year alone.
But all this air travel has an environmental price. Eco-conscious travelers have begun to notice, spurring organizations that allow you to purchase carbon offsets to compensate.
The Air Transit Association of America, taking action on these concerns, announced last year that they would work together to improve their carbon footprint 50% by 2050, compared to a baseline in 2005.
“As an industry, we’ve made commitments to reduce our emissions 1.5% each year from now until 2020,” says Bob Sturtz, Managing Director for Strategic Sourcing – Fuel, at United Airlines and a featured speaker at this week’s Net Impact Conference. After 2020, the industry hopes that all its growth will be carbon neutral.
Beyond the Sweatshop: Developing Tools for Supply Chain Assessment
by Jess Sand
One of the most contentious realities of the new economy is that consumers’ concern for the social impacts of any given product or service is increasingly driving their purchasing behavior. This has left companies large and small scrambling to account for those impacts, which can often be difficult to parse and even more difficult to measure. “Can we come up with a way of working along with the private sector,” asks Kyle Cahill, Senior Program Officer for the Poverty Footprint Project at Oxfam America, “for them to start approaching social issues with the same rigor and reporting that they use to look at something like climate change, or water?”
Cahill will discuss how the apparel industry in particular is answering this question in response to public concern over sweatshop labor during a panel called “From Boycott to Buycott: Turning the Anti-sweatshop Rhetoric Upside Down,” at next weekend’s Net Impact Conference – 2020: Vision for a Sustainable Decade .
Business as UNusual: The MBA as Part of Your Sustainable Career Path
By Samantha Johnston
As many upcoming college graduates and professionals are looking at graduate school applications for next fall, some are considering the MBA as part of their career path. Net Impact is shedding light on this topic in a few ways, most notably the 2010 Business as UNusual guide to graduate programs. For more advice on choosing a graduate program and advancing your sustainability career, Net Impact sat down with Sustainability Recruiting CEO Ellen Weinreb, who recently spoke on our Issues in Depth call about using this year’s Net Impact Conference for career networking.
When considering if an MBA is the right stepping stone for your career, think ahead to opportunities post-MBA. “What comes into play when finding a job after business school is the work that was done prior to the degree, so don’t think of the MBA as your only factor,” cautions Weinreb. “The best scenario for someone to pursue an MBA is when their career trajectory just needs that business toolkit to get to the next step.”
Design Thinking for Social Innovation: A Conversation with IDEO’s Sally Madsen
by Jess Sand
As the private sector beings to embrace the possibility that social innovation can lead to a robust bottom line, companies face the very real challenge of figuring out what these efforts might actually look like on the ground. Can a for-profit business truly adapt conventional operational approaches to build a more just and healthy world? How does it measure impacts that go beyond the financial? And how do you get your organization to commit resources to these new approaches? The answers, according to Sally Madsen of design firm IDEO, can be found through a systemic approach to the human experience known as design thinking.
Don’t Get Lost in Translation: Building CSR Value from Every Department
By Jennifer Chin
While we finally have reached a point when terms like CSR, triple bottom line, and GHG emissions don’t spin heads and leave folks fumbling around for a dictionary, there’s another language barrier now challenging CSR champions in the workplace: how to translate social and environmental values into financial metrics. This link, according to dedicated CSR professionals, is critical to making the business case for new initiatives.
“The end goal across the tech industry is to more fully integrate CSR into business,” says Suzanne Fallender, Director of CSR Strategy & Communications at Intel. “But until you can better measure CSR financially and link back to business value and strategy, it will always continue to be something separate.”
In other words, it’s not enough to simply develop company-wide recycling programs, invest in energy-efficient light bulbs, and build employee volunteer programs – you have to find a way to talk about these initiatives in the same way you’d talk about IT or R&D investments in order to effectively implement them throughout an organization.
Results from the 2009 Net Impact Challenge: MBAs and Professionals Take Action
MBAs and professionals stepped up to the network-wide Net Impact Challenge this year, highlighting impact projects ranging from corporate sustainable commuting programs to university composting initiatives.
As the third annual competition, Net Impact’s Executive Director Liz Maw said, “This year’s teams have raised the bar to a new level. The entries we received highlight the incredible work Net Impact members are doing in their offices, campuses, and communities. We are proud to support them through our network.”
For Net Impact’s nearly 250 student and professional chapters around the world, the annual Net Impact Challenge is a chance to receive recognition for their efforts to make a more sustainable world using the power of business. “Our chapter really wanted to find a way to put the ‘Magnify Your Impact’ motto into action,” said Matthew Holtry, a Net Impact Challenge project leader from the Penn State Smeal College of Business who developed a campus supplier sustainability scorecard. “For us, the project was a win-win-win. We got to add sustainable value to our campus while expanding the MBA curriculum and getting more exposure for our Net Impact chapter on campus.”
So here’s what all the hype is about:
A World-Changing Marketing Agency? Commuter Challenge Is Just One Way Imc² Is Leading A Movement.
The 2009 Net Impact Challenge drew to a close a few weeks ago and winners have yet to be announced. You’ll hear about them soon here on Triple Pundit. The annual challenge recognizes and rewards outstanding Net Impact members who lead employee or student-driven projects with tangible positive social and/or environmental impacts on their campus, in their workplace, or in their community.
We’ve invited challenge participants to share their story with Triple Pundit readers. This is the first in the series – from brand engagement agency imc2 who successfully implemented a “Commuter Challenge” to encourage positive changes in the way employees commute.
Please read on for their story…
Is Business Education Changing Given the 2008 Financial Crisis?
The financial crisis that started in 2007, peaked in 2008 and continues to persist into 2009 sparked an international debate on how business education created (and possibly could have prevented) this whole ordeal. Business school curriculum drew scrutiny, admissions standards were criticized, and students signed ethics pledges – all in the hope of clearing the name of the now maligned MBA.
But is the current PR blitz just an exercise in crisis reputation management or will it actually change how business school educates future leaders? While the conversation may continue for years to come, We’ve been exploring the student perspective on how graduate business programs are addressing sustainable and ethical leadership today.
This year, in our annual Business as UNusual guide, Net Impact members and students at schools throughout the world shared their perspectives on how well (or how poorly) their business program tackles issues around social and environmental responsibility. More than 85 schools submitted profiles for this year’s guide, providing sustainability details on each program’s admissions process, core curriculum, student activities, notable graduates and career services. This year we noticed a lot of continuing positive trends.
Net Impact 2008: Cleantech VC Wrap-up
Friday’s second session at the Net Impact North America conference was Cleantech Venture Capital Investing. After having interviewed two of the three panelists prior to the conference (posts are here and here), the panel itself was an opportunity to think more deeply about the lessons offered by some of the most experienced players in the cleantech sector. The panelists were three managing directors at Philadelphia-based VC firms: from left to right, Joyce Ferris, David Lincoln, and Tucker Twitmyer. The moderator, Clint Wilder, is at the far right.
The panel started off with the standard “What is cleantech?” question, which the audience and panelists all clearly dreaded. Joyce stepped up to the plate, however, with a very succinct answer that seemed to surprise everyone present: “Cleantech is any technology that reduces natural resource consumption.” I’ll take that over Wikipedia’s definition any day.
Rebuilding a Green New Orleans: Social Enterprise in the Lower 9th Ward
Executive Director of the non-profit Make it Right, Tom Darden, has been working closely with New Orleans officials and community leaders like Charles Allen in order to rebuild the Lower 9th Ward with eco-friendly houses. He dubs it, “the toughest redevelopment project in the country.”
As if the idea of constructing new, efficient and “green” homes in the devastated area weren’t innovative enough, the NGO’s origins are more original than most. Make it Right (MIR) was started by Brad Pitt in response to hurricane Katrina. It now has 25 employees and just completed its first 6 environmentally friendly homes built using the cradle to cradle philosophy of zero waste.
Net Impact 2008: Irrational Exuberance in Electric Vehicles
The room was packed on Friday for a panel entitled “Bringing Electric Cars to the Mass Market”. The moderator, Bill Moore, editor of EV World, set the stage with a historical perspective–did you know that Henry Ford’s wife drove an electric car?–and then launched straight into the thick of things.
Before being critical, let me just say that I really enjoyed the panel. The panelists had some excellent things to say on the topics of battery rental, lithium availability, and V2G technology. The audience was very knowledgeable and engaged and the room was filled to capacity.
Net Impact 2008: Private/Public Partnerships at Accenture
In 2003 Management Consulting firm Accenture created the Accenture Development Partnership (ADP) as a means of providing consulting services to NGOs, foundations and donor organizations working in the development sector. Since its launch, ADP has completed 200+ projects in 55 countries with more than 45 different client organizations.
I caught up with Senior Manager Chris Jurgens yesterday to better understand the program, its benefits to Accenture, as well as why it constitutes a “second generation” private-public partnership.
First Generation: pre-ADP
For Accenture the first generation of development consulting was its Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) program, inaugurated in 1999. Still in place today, the VSO program was instituted to allow Accenture’s consultants to take sabbaticals and engage in international development consulting for 6 months to 1 year.
The VSO advantage is that consultants remain Accenture employees and do not deviate from their career tracks. Consultants take a 50% pay cut, and they organize their own projects/partnerships with host NGOs.
Net Impact 2008: Interview with Ideablob’s Ami Kassar
Napoleon Wallace - As sustainable entrepreneurship has evolved, the growing need for innovative resources that can provide support to this niche entrepreneur has become increasingly evident. The result has been a wave of innovation that is providing new platforms and resources so that good ideas can be nurtured to fruition for the benefit of both entrepreneurs and stakeholders.
One such company is Ideablob.com, an online community that allows entrepreneurs to share and grow their business ideas. In addition, each month a “winning” idea is awarded $10,000 based on votes from the rest of the ideablob.com community.
I had the opportunity to speak with Ami Kassar, founder and the Chief Innovation Officer of Ideablob (his bio can be found here), to briefly discuss his thoughts on the growing need for resources that support new ideas, and Ideablob’s role in helping to fill this gap. He will be a part of the “Web 2.0 Panel” on Friday during the Net Impact North America Conference.
Net Impact 2008: Interview with Cleantech Investor Joyce Ferris
Joyce Ferris is a managing director of Blue Hill Partners (her bio can be found here). She will be a part of the panel for “Early Stage Financing for Clean Tech” on Friday during the Net Impact North America Conference.
When reading through the Blue Hill website, one thing in particular caught my eye. I’ve looked through more than 50 cleantech private equity firms’ websites but haven’t seen anyone else with this type of strategy:
We concentrate in areas within the GreenTech sector and build investment ‘clusters’. To date, Blue Hill has built a cluster around energy efficiency technologies for application in commercial and industrial buildings and facilities. (link)
I asked Joyce to elaborate on her cluster strategy:
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