We enhance companies’ business success by integrating sustainability into their business
and developing sustainable business models.

– engaging and enabling your company to improve its sustainability and innovation capabilities

Get a comprehensive view of your company’s ability to innovate and achieve its sustainability objectives with our Sustainability Maturity Assessment. We provide a deep and thorough diagnosis of all the sustainability management practices that are key for you to succeed. By determining your current maturity profile, your strengths and improvement opportunities will become very clear. This will allow you and your team to identify the most critical areas for action as well as benchmark your sustainability efforts against others.

Click here for more information about our Maturity Model.

Case study: Steelcase

– translating your sustainability vision into actionable change

Companies must change to become more sustainable, but changing a company is an immense challenge. Change in organizations can bring about anxiety and fear and is often met with resistance. We provide your company with a clear purpose and structure the process of transforming itself to become more sustainable. We will support you throughout the entire process of preparing, managing and reinforcing change throughout the entire organization.

The transition to a more sustainable business should start with an assessment of sustainability management practices (see Maturity diagnosis) to determine your company’s current state. Engaging top management and key stakeholders, we then help you build a shared and strategic vision for sustainability. Once you have established where you want to go, we draft a comprehensive roadmap and tailor concrete action plans for your company to reach its vision. We provide close and collaborative end-to-end support throughout the process from planning and managing change to measuring and reinforcing progress.

– setting the objectives that will guide your business towards sustainability

Well-defined sustainability targets inspire top management and key stakeholders. They provide clear orientation, concrete guidance and help prioritize actions in companies. We help you focus on the issues that are strategically important to your company and stakeholders based on significant environmental and social impact as well as business opportunities. All targets should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-dependent (SMART), which will allow you to monitor your company’s progress towards its sustainability objectives. We help you formulate targets and select indicators based on scientific evidence about environmental thresholds and carrying capacity (such as climate change) and policy objectives (such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals). We benchmark your targets and provide evidence about what is economically feasible, socially preferable and technically possible to determine the level of ambition of your target. For each potential target, we assess the risks and consequences of setting the target. We are also able to assist in disaggregating corporate targets to specific businesses, operations, markets and products.

Click here for more information about sustainability indicators and dashboards.

Case study: VELUX

– defining and deploying your sustainability strategy to achieve business success

We help companies build a shared vision and strong strategy for sustainability that is aligned with their business objectives. Based on your company’s internal and external drivers, we assist you in defining a common vision for sustainability, identify opportunities, prioritize actions, set targets and develop roadmaps. We will support you throughout the entire process of defining the strategy and deploying it throughout the entire organization. Engaging top management and other key stakeholders is crucial to ensuring that the sustainability strategy is integrated into core business strategy and operations. We cover not just what must be done, but also how it will be done using our Maturity Model.

Click here for more information about our Maturity Model.

– establishing the rationale for sustainability

A compelling business case is often needed to gather support and commitment to advance with sustainability. We assist you in understanding, and when possible quantifying, the net financial and strategic benefits of sustainable business. These may be due to better management of risks, greater productivity and growth from new business opportunities. We will ensure that your business case is linked to your business strategy and objectives. A good business case is based on solid evidence and is well-articulated to be clear and credible to the entire organization.

Case study: adidas

– how to become a serial winner

Innovation is where sustainability holds the greatest promise, but it is also the hardest to achieve. We inspire and enable companies to become serial winners at eco- and social innovation. Using our Maturity Model, we provide a systematic way to measure and improve product development and innovation capabilities in your organization. Our knowledge of state-of-the-art best practices for sustainable innovation will allow you to enhance your ability to design, develop and deliver innovative products and services with significantly improved environmental and social performance.

– a systematic approach to the circular economy

Companies are increasingly seeing the business opportunities and environmental benefits of the circular economy. There are many different strategies and business models that lead to a more circular economy, but depending on a company’s context and capabilities, some are better suited than others. We help you develop the most promising circular economy strategies and solutions. We first determine your readiness for circular economy business and then identify the practices that are necessary for succeeding.

– establishing the rationale for sustainability

There is a growing interest in Product-as-a-Service (PaaS) business models, where instead of selling products, companies offer services to better address customers’ needs. An example of PaaS is Michelin’s ‘pay per kilometer’ tire management service. While it has been demonstrated that PaaS business can grow revenue and be more profitable than traditional product sales, many companies face challenges when trying to scale-up the business and increase profitability.

We help you develop and improve your abilities for PaaS business. Using our Maturity Model, we assess your company’s internal capabilities and potential to become more service-oriented. Based on your current maturity profile, we identify the key areas for action and determine what concrete steps you and your company need to take to be successful with PaaS business.

Click here for more information about our Maturity Model.

Case study: Michelin

– ensuring that all products are sustainable

Most companies have already applied LCA and ecodesign in their product development projects, but few companies have a clear strategy for ensuring that their entire product portfolio is sustainable. We help companies identify the key environmental and social issues that they need to address, and then define the approach to evaluating their sustainability performance to guide the development of new products.

– using the right tool for the job

There is no lack of sustainability approaches, methods and tools in product development and design, but these are often applied without a good understanding of the organization and its processes. If you are already very advanced with sustainability in your company, then you should use tools that cater to your specific needs and challenges. If you are only just starting to consider environmental and social issues when designing and developing products, a simpler, more general design tool can get you far. Thanks to our mapping of over 800 concepts, best practices and tools related to sustainability in companies, we know which ones are the most effective to apply to your specific context.

– integrating social and environmental considerations in product development

Companies are increasingly realizing that the integration of sustainability into business and product development has the potential to substantially improve the value of the product and reduce production costs. We support companies to systematically integrate sustainability into product development and other core business processes, based on state-of-the-art best practices, tools and approaches. By taking a step-by-step approach to improving your organization’s capability in product development, you will be able to consistently design and develop products with improved sustainability performance.

– identifying best practices and areas for improvement

Is your company a leader in sustainability or is it lagging behind? We assess your companies’ sustainability management practices, and compare its performance with the best practices in industry. This will enable your company to identify its strengths and areas for improvement. We assist companies in developing plans on how to make improvements or adapt specific best practices to enhance their sustainability performance. This is an effective and efficient way to succeeding with sustainability.

– providing better value to customers

Manufacturing companies have traditionally focused their efforts on designing, developing and producing products. Today, for various reasons, manufacturers are integrating more services into their products – rather than the product itself, the actual value to customers is more based on the access, use or performance of the product through services – often better addressing the customers’ needs. For example, some customers are more interest in a mobility service than owning a car to get them around town.

We help you develop and improve your abilities for service-oriented solutions. We will consider design changes to the product to make it fit for services; examine customer needs and activities to identify a better value proposition; and, assess your company’s and its value network’s competencies and management practices to be able to be more service-oriented. We can guide you through the entire process from development to launch as well as scale-up.

– mitigating risks and identify opportunities from legislation

Many companies struggle to keep up with the increasing amount of environmental and social legislation in place around the world. This represents a severe risk to business as non-compliance can lead to fines, reputational damage, shutting down operations, removing products from a market or, even worse, an incident with disastrous environmental and human consequences. We enable companies to efficiently manage the compliance of their products and operations to local, national and transnational regulation. We systematically improve your organization’s capabilities for ensuring compliance by applying state-of-the-art best practices, tools and approaches, which will allow you to free up resources that can be used to identify sustainability opportunities and improve business performance.

– creating capabilities and structures to effectively manage sustainability

Successful integration and effective management of sustainability requires a solid governance structure. We support companies by establishing and improving their capabilities to provide sustainability leadership, implement sustainability strategy and ensure oversight and accountability. Effective governance will allow you to better manage and prioritize your sustainability business foundation, excellence and innovation – all key for long-term business success.

– providing guidance and tracking progress towards sustainability

A common proverb in business is “what gets measured, gets managed”. While this is also true for sustainability, it is important that a company applies the right performance indicators for their objectives and organization. We help companies select the best sustainability performance indicators and design dashboards relevant for their specific objectives. It is important to consider a mix of both process-oriented and product-oriented indicators in an organization. We assess your indicators based on their relevance for your objectives; their acceptability and credibility among stakeholders; easiness to collect and compute; as well as their robustness of use. Good indicators provide valuable guidance for the entire organization on what needs to be done to advance on environmental and social issues.