Sustainable Enterprise
What are the next big challenges and opportunities for sustainable enterprise?
For the past two decades, sustainability strategies have focused on eco-efficiency, stakeholder engagement, and social responsibility in existing core businesses. Now companies are being challenged to move “beyond greening” to develop breakthrough innovations that confront directly the two biggest problems facing humanity: growing inequity and accelerating environmental degradation. The challenge—and the opportunity--is to harness technological and business model innovation to create new growth platforms that actually regenerate the environment and lift the base of the income pyramid—while earning a profit.
Clean technology venturing now represents one of the largest investment categories in the world and Base of the Pyramid (BoP) business and social entrepreneurship have gained significant momentum throughout the developing world. The Green Leap merges these two strategies, recognizing that clean technologies (e.g. renewable energy, distributed generation, point-of-use water treatment, biomaterials) are frequently disruptive in character.
As a result, the base of the pyramid is often the best place to focus initial commercialization attention. By using clean technologies to meet the needs of underserved communities, companies can create innovative business models and strategies with enormous growth and profit potential, and move us simultaneously toward a sustainable world—socially, environmentally, and economically. Ultimately, these sustainable innovations can “trickle up” to the top of the pyramid, presenting enormous growth and profit opportunities through "reverse innovation."