Corporate Sustainability an der TU München

0) New concepts development: To reconsider the whole concept of offering

1) Low-impact materials: choosing the materials that you will be using, easily recyles, choose the ones with low energy requirement

2) Reduce material: use less material to generate less waste

3) optimize production: moving to cleaner production processes, less waste

4) Optimize distribution: e.g. what type of transportation is used

5) Optimize user stage: reducing the amount of toxic , 80 % of emission happen during the user stage --> the source of electricity for electric cars is really impacting on the device´s footprint

6) Optimize initial lifetime: create goods that last long, create products that imply a strong personal connection, repair must be cheaper than a new product

7) Optimize end-of-life system: stimulate the reuse or a second life of a product

• Relationship Marketing: focuses on relationships and narrow market scope
• Modern Marketing: focuses on commercial transactions and narrow markets
• Eco-Marketing and ethical Marketing: focuses on commercial transactions and a broad scope on the triple bottom line (market, society and planet)
• Sustainability Marketing: focuses on relationships and a broad triple bottom line scope : pours relationship Marketing with ecological concerns, promotes social justice and equality, avoid making existing injustice worse

Companies choose a sustainability portfolio approach that consists of four strategies:

1) Tomorrow and internal: Clean Technology: develop the sustainable competencies of the future and get Innovation and Repositioning

2) Today and internal: Pollution Prevention: minimize waste and emissions form operations to reduce risk and costs

3) Tomorrow and External: Base of the pyramid: create a shared road map for meeting unmet needs to grow and trajectory

4) External and Today: Product Stewardship: Integrate stakeholder views into the business processes to increase reputation and legitimacy

• you can have the value mainly in product (product content = tangible) or in service content (is intangible)
• if you are rather product-oriented:
  1. Product related
  2. Advice and consultancy
• Use oriented:
  3: Product lease
  4. Product renting
  5. Product pooling
• result-oriented:
  6. Activity management (outsourcing different functions like cleaning service
  7. Pay per service unit
  8. Functional result, which is the most loose concept, difficult to track and measure, high potential, produce provide and use have a high impact on the final outcome

...is an not individualized organizational effort that rather has an industrial look on how things work, is about optimizing a network with firms that have a similar value chain

...coorperations between companies that create a system which has positive society and environment impact

• Interdisciplinary
• natural systems as archetypes for industrial systems
• material and energetic flows form industrial system that are interconnected as industrial Metabolism
• Goals of a closed loop: zero energy consumes, zero emissions produced, zero wast generated
• example: Covenburg Denmark: closed loop between energy and material flow, inflow of one is outflow of another, high possible circulation

Stage 1: Pre-compliance: Companies try to fight social and environmenal responsability
Stage 2: Compliance: do the neccessary by law

Stage 3: Beyond Compliance
stages 1-3 are reactive

Stage 4: Integrated Strategy: Corporate Sustainability is embedded in the value chain, linking market opportunities with sustainability

Stage 5: Purpose & Passion: is easier for entrepreneurs than for established companies, should define a company

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-immediate financial goals are more urgent
-absence of a compelling business case for sustainability
-lack of consensus on ultimate goals of sustainability program

• a design approach while being inspired by nature, learning form evolution science and applying it to humans
• e.g. in aerodynamics, rotors of a windmill

-factor 4 and factor 10

-technology can solve a problem but the impact is decided on how we use and build them (E-Autos)

-technology is value-free and they way it is used decides about its impact

-rebound effect: cars can now drive further than before but need hence more fuel (are not really more efficient)

• entrepreneurship lies in each of us
• start with available means
• constantly develop imagination about various goals and do not fix on a specific one
• no expected return for an investment
• rather an affordable loss
• exchange goals and means with others
• co-create with partners
• business plans do not reduce uncertainty but limit options
• luck is part of the process but the method helps to increase the odds
• learn to be an entrepreneur (they are not born this way)
• do not predict the future but rather develop it and deal with uncertainty