March Experts predict that today's population will increase by another 50% to reach more than 10 billion people by 2050. The demands on both the climate and the world’s diminishing resources are likely to be even more intense as emerging societies move towards a higher standard of living. With increasing numbers of people demanding more from a planet that is already reaching its limit, it is not “rocket science” to work out that sustainability will be an increasingly hot issue, not just in terms of the climate, but also in guaranteeing that we have enough food to eat and enough energy to keep functioning. By now, just about everyone recognizes that we have a problem, but as the recent climate change conference in Copenhagen demonstrated, creating enabling mechanisms and changing behavior and perceptions is not easy.
The Forum for Corporate Sustainability Management (CSM), a research and learning initiative of IMD, was established to help companies integrate social and environmental issues into corporate strategies and processes. The short way of saying it is that we work with a membership of global companies to “get stuff done” in the area of global sustainability. We also facilitate cross fertilization of learning amongst companies and industries. Above all, CSM can work with teams faced with sustainability challenges in companies and, using open innovation and knowledge brokering techniques, help them to “leapfrog” towards solutions. Research indicates that there can be significant barriers to introducing process innovation into any organization. This can be especially true in business, and above all when it comes to process innovation related to sustainability strategies. Management tends to see innovation itself as a “fuzzy” area. Entrenched mindsets, reluctance to introduce change into a system that already seems to be working (“if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”) and a tendency to short-term strategic planning, are some of the main hurdles to new ideas.[This article has been reproduced with permission from IMD, a leading business school based in Switzerland. http://www.imd.org]