The Harvard Business Review is focused on sustainability this month. The latest research shows that sustainable businesses not only perform better but are also more innovative. Sounds logical in hindsight, but somewhere along the way we got away from building organizations that were sustainable – too much optimization of the short term at the expense of the long term. From HBR:
Executives behave as though they have to choose between the largely social benefits of developing sustainable products or processes and the financial costs of doing so. But that’s simply not true. We’ve been studying the sustainability initiatives of 30 large corporations for some time. Our research shows that sustainability is a mother lode of organizational and technological innovations that yield both bottom-line and top-line returns. Becoming environment-friendly lowers costs because companies end up reducing the inputs they use. In addition, the process generates additional revenues from better products or enables companies to create new businesses. In fact, because those are the goals of corporate innovation, we find that smart companies now treat sustainability as innovation’s new frontier.
