Convening and collaboration

In many instances, even the largest and most ambitious business cannot make real progress alone. The Centre convenes organisations to examine the role of business, understand common challenges and barriers to progress, raise the collective level of ambition, and co-create or co-fund solutions.

The Centre's Business Transformation Group, a collaborative leadership group of forward-looking international businesses, is working to help companies set a truly sustainable business path across key areas such as nature, climate, circular economy and inequality. The Group, which includes Croda, Dentsu International, Ingka Group (IKEA), and Majid Al Futtaim, will co-create and apply new thinking on inclusive, nature-positive, circular, net zero and resilient business strategies and models and this will inform the tools and new approaches to lead the corporate sector in meeting these ambitions.

Through its Business and Nature team the Centre also collaborates with companies to identify what the ecological crisis means for their businesses and take steps to transform their operations and strategies. The team provides the structured path that businesses need to establish sustainability solutions and create momentum at scale. 

The Centre also focuses on bringing together companies and academics to find market let solutions to the SDGs. For example the Centre’s Inclusive Development Programme explores how companies can become better agents of inclusive development in the global south.

Research

The Rewiring the Economy plan identified four strategic tasks that business needs to address in order to create long-term value in the context of a sustainable economy. While some businesses are already making progress on these, we know that in many instances key questions need to be answered in order to unlock scalable, meaningful progress.

The Centre’s research programme aims to identify and respond to the most important questions that will shape the future of corporations. Drawing on the University’s world-class research, the Centre will create new workstreams to conduct practitioner-focused research and thought leadership to address the gaps in the evidence base that are barriers to business progress. This wide-ranging remit can be broken down in three principal ways: who we work with, what we study, and how it connects to practice. As part of our commitment to enacting real-world change, we have identified five ‘applications in practice’ which drive research at CISL:

• Future risk and opportunity - A better understanding of sustainability risks allows companies to convert them into opportunities.
• Business strategies and models - Sustainable business models enable companies to go beyond financial success into purposeful impact on society.
• Measures, targets and disclosure - Key to trust is transparency, and sustainability provides the perfect performance framework.
• Culture, capacity and leadership - Seeing problems differently demands leadership, yet this is exactly what companies must do to become agents of positive change.
• Social and political change - Companies can use their influence to drive sustainability, aligning their ambitions with long-term value creation for society.

This may include harnessing existing research, commissioning new academic research or working with business to pilot new responses and inform our core research themes:

 Possible lines of inquiry include:

• What do the practices, processes, policies, structures and thinking of a sustainable business look like?
• How can organisational purpose, culture, governance and leadership models change to deliver sustainability?
• How best can companies create and distribute value for a sustainable economy, and how can business measure and optimise its impact and contribution to society and the environment?
• What role should business play in addressing growing inequalities?
• What business strategies can most effectively restore and regenerate the environment while remaining profitable and building competitive advantage?

Education and advisory

Our work with businesses over the last 30 years indicates that in many instances, even when leadership teams are enthusiastic and energised about their role in delivering a sustainable future, it is unclear what they need to do, how they should prioritise tasks, and which stakeholders they need to engage in order to be most effective.

The Centre will help individual organisations to find specific answers, develop scalable solutions to common business challenges that push the boundaries of leading practice, and help companies measure and optimise their impact and value to society.

The Centre will work with business to:

• Diagnose where companies are on their transition, where they need to get to and how they can accelerate change.
• Support companies integrate sustainability in their strategies in order to align with a net zero carbon transition, reduce economic inequalities, and protect and restore nature.
• Design and implement sustainable business transformation programmes to leverage strategy, people and technology towards becoming a sustainable business.
• Develop and pilot innovative commercial approaches and solutions across value chains to address specific risks and opportunities.

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