Case: Creating pragmatic sustainability principles for leading Danish company
A leading Danish company within product development approached Social Action to develop a set of guiding principles that should help the company understand and operationalise their sustainability policy.
The company already had an existing sustainability program developed by the company's Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) department. The already developed sustainability program was limited to document the companies' current ecological footprint and didn't take into account how sustainability could be used strategically to active new break-through thinking within the company and benefit the development of new products and services. For this purpose Social Action was contacted to create strategic guidance to the companies' sustainability direction.
Social Action chose to critique the companies' sustainability definition and developed a new theoretical model that aligned the sustainability definition with the companies' long-term vision and purpose. This was done to use sustainability more fluently and practically across all the companies' different departments. To do this, Social Action created a research platform that involved Social Action's expert network in Denmark and abroad to thoroughly understand several global industries' successful implementations of sustainability policies.
As important background knwoledge, Social Action mapped key principles and guidelines from the cultural, corporate and scientific history of the 20th Century. This was done to understand previous successes that had generated a new kind of thinking, new behaviours and new actions within companies, organisations and nations.
All research components were transformed into 9 concrete principles and action steps that used the companies original vision and purpose to spearhead a new understanding and pragmatic use of sustainability as part of the companies' innovation strategy. The 9 principles are now being transformed into concrete innovation activities to spearhead new break-through concepts and designs for products and services. The development is ongoing.
Outcomes:
- A new theoretical model of sustainability specifically developed to fit the companies' purpose and activities.
- A set of sustainability principles followed by concrete action steps and case illustrations that helped the company turn the principles into action.