Sustainable Innovation Strategies

This book discusses two central concepts: sustainability and innovation. A lot has been written about these two concepts, focusing on specific instances of sustainable products and services, and how these are innovative and generate value for the company. However, we were not inter- ested in that. In fact we believe that any multinational company today can probably come up with some examples of sustainability projects that have been innovative and successful. That is why many company annual sustainability reports today seem to be well developed lists of successful sustainability projects. We are interested in analyzing companies that have sustainability and in- novation as central pillars of their business models, and that, therefore, consider these two issues as two of their most important key competitiveness factors.

In this book we explore Danone and Interface, two companies that are market leaders in their sector, and which have business models that while obviously considering classic performance indicators such as revenues, sales or productivity, seem to focus on innovation and sustainabil- ity as two of their central strategic issues at the core of their business model. Our aim is to ana- lyze first whether and how innovation and sustainability affect each other, and the impact these strategic issues have on the competitiveness model of these two companies. In that regard, we do not want to simply study sustainable innovative projects, but rather how sustainability and innovation are connected to each other and how they affect Danone and Interface. Second, we want to understand why these two companies have placed sustainability and innovation at the centre of their business model, and whether there are some common features that these two companies share that explains that phenomenon. The objective is of course to come up with a model that explains how companies place sustainability and innovation as core competitiveness attributes and, most importantly, to help other companies understand how they could potentially follow similar strategies.