Businesses are under increasing pressure to improve the sustainability of their practices, such as where they source their products or how much energy they use. Among business leaders, there is also a growing awareness that sustainable practices such as future-proofing a supply chain, increasing efficiency or improving public image, can be good for business.
The logic of competition dictates that businesses should solve problems alone. Yet many experts say the opposite: structured collaboration can be an effective method for developing and implementing solutions to complex sustainability challenges.
In their 2010 book, Facilitating Sustainable Innovation through Collaboration, editors Joseph Stark, James Cordeiro and Diego Vazquez-Brust argue that “radical” sustainability innovation requires a focus on collaboration. “Collaborative efforts within the corporate (for-profit) sector may occur within organisations, groups and teams that span organisational boundaries,” they add, “such as supply chain partnerships and strategic alliances with other corporate entities.”
This sort of strategic alliance arises most naturally between businesses that share common concerns. The Sustainable Apparel Coalition, for instance, includes fashion brands, manufacturers, and retailers. The coalition is currently developing a tool for standardising how the environmental and social impact of clothing production is measured.
Another example is The Sustainable Shipping Initiative (SSI), an alliance of 20 shipping companies combining efforts to tackle issues such as fuel efficiency. The alliance began in the form of dialogues initiated by Forum for the Future, a London-based NGO. “Collaboration is a vehicle for tackling common challenges,” says Sally Uren, Forum’s chief executive. “The problems we face are just too big for one business to solve alone. Take palm oil, for example. If you want to convert the global supply to sustainable sources, then producers, suppliers, brands and governments must work together.”
Uren points out the staggering number of sustainability collaborations that have cropped up in the last few years, such as The Sustainability Consortium, The Sustainable Energy Coalition, The Consumer Goods Forum. “It’s indicative of how collaboration is critical to solving big, systemic challenges” she says. “Without collaboration, you simply cannot deliver solutions at scale.”
Knowledge-sharing
Solutions are often generated by sharing knowledge, and learning how sustainability challenges have been met by others. The Crystal, an exhibition and event space in London’s Docklands, wants to create a space for this to happen. Its mix of conferences, events and exhibitions are designed to showcase different solutions and inspire organisations to further their own sustainability. During the last nine months The Crystal has hosted Unilever’s Change Leaders Conference, The World Water Summit, and an annual IT conference jointly hosted by Construction Opportunities for Mobile IT (COMIT) Projects Ltd and Fiatech.
“We are proud to have a niche sustainable event building in London,” says event manager Chris Dillon. “True sustainability cannot be achieved in isolation. If you look at any company process,” he explains, “whether it is supply chain or operation, there are almost always multiple stakeholders. While they may all have a sustainability focus, their specific goals could be drastically different.”
Geraldine Samuelsson-Brown, membership and finance director of COMIT, says the conference explored how mobile technology can enable engineers on construction sites to report data more efficiently. “Engineers have to go back to the office at the end of the day to report on what they’ve done,” she says. “We are looking at using mobile technology to keep a real-time diary - capturing photos, GPS data, site notes.”
Samuelsson-Brown says the event was an opportunity for stakeholders in the construction industry to share information with each other, but also to look outside itself for examples of what worked elsewhere. “We are interested in stories - a business that had a problem and reached out to technology for help,” she says. “It could be somebody from aerospace or from the army; anybody who has used IT in a way that we can learn from. Sharing stories helps businesses be open minded.”
Online communities
While events and conferences facilitate face-to-face dialogue, some businesses are taking the conversation online. Martin Chillot is the founder of 2degrees, an Oxford-based company that runs an online community which facilitates business-to-business collaborations around sustainability challenges.
“These collaborations manifest themselves in the sharing of best practice and first-hand experience, through things like discussions, site visits and webinars,” explains Chillot. “We are using social media to improve knowledge-sharing and remove silos. For example, in a community of 500 food and drink suppliers, an operational manager from one company might post a discussion asking if anyone knows what kind of LEDs are most efficient for use in cold storage units. Answers and advice are then posted by other suppliers.”
Three years ago, 2degrees developed a private online platform for supermarket chain Asda, which enabled the company’s suppliers to work together to “cut costs and improve resource efficiency in energy, waste and water”. Chillot says the results were impressive: “One of Asda’s farm suppliers cut 80,000kg of carbon emissions and saved more £190,000 after seeking advice from fellow suppliers about making improvements to their energy efficient cold store.”
Uren agrees that the best collaborations work when there is shared ownership of issues and outcomes. “Enlightened self-interest has to kick in,” she says. “That’s when businesses will hold themselves to account.”
Content on this page is paid for and provided by The Crystal, sponsor of the Guardian Sustainable Business Awards 2015 and the business futures hub.
