PRODUCT, SERVICE & DESIGN INNOVATION -
Back to the Roots, an Oakland, California startup pioneering how families reconnect with food, announced today that it has expanded its January crowdfunding campaign on CircleUp into a $10M Series A. The new investment was led by Acre Venture Partners, Campbell Soup’s venture capital fund for food startups, and also includes funding from S2G Ventures and Red Sea Ventures.
CHEMISTRY, MATERIALS & PACKAGING -
From investors to growers, producers, blenders and consumers, the below50 initiative, launched today, expects to attract every industry sector involved in the pipeline of sustainable fuels. Any company who produces, uses and/or invests in fuels that are at least 50 percent less carbon intensive than conventional fossil fuels can join below50.
PRODUCT, SERVICE & DESIGN INNOVATION -
In today's startup world, high burn rates and the need to raise multiple rounds of funding have become the norm. It's believed that this is the only path to "scalability" — a word that has lost its meaning through a decade of abuse. Before a company, particularly a social enterprise, can become scalable it must have a sustainable foundation that solves a significant problem at a micro level. DivvyUp is a sock company that began out of Florida State University’s entrepreneurship program and is a great example of how to build a viable base to mitigate the risks that comes with growing into a national brand.
NEW METRICS -
Oil company shareholders are voting on resolutions today that propose to cut spending on opening new oilfields and change how they report reserves, among others. In Dallas, Texas, ExxonMobil shareholders are voting on four climate change-related resolutions, while Chevron has four such issues on the ballot for its Annual General Meeting in San Ramon, California.
The same firms that convinced ExxonMobil to report on climate change and carbon asset risk in 2014, Arjuna Capital and As You Sow, are leading the charge again with these new proposals.
STAKEHOLDER TRENDS AND INSIGHTS -
Understanding investor priorities is an important responsibility for a company’s top executives and its board of directors, yet, new findings show that managers’ perceptions of investors are out of date.
PRODUCT, SERVICE & DESIGN INNOVATION -
Starbucks Corporation announced on Monday that it completed the underwriting of an initial public offering of senior notes, including its first-ever U.S. Corporate Sustainability Bond.
PRODUCT, SERVICE & DESIGN INNOVATION -
You’ve probably heard plenty of startups claim they can “revolutionize” their industry, but in the case of Bolt Threads, they may actually be right. The California-based biotechnology startup is already manufacturing its Engineered Silk™ protein at scale and made two big announcements this week at TechCrunch Disrupt NY: the conclusion of a $50 million Series C financing round, and a new partnership with apparel brand Patagonia.
ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE -
It was the mid-‘90s. The Board of Directors at Vancity – a large regional financial institution based in Vancouver, Canada – was struggling to get management’s attention on its social purpose agenda. I and the other directors believed that marrying social goals with the company’s business could create a powerful vehicle for regional prosperity: attract customers, become a force for social progress and build business. The impasse continued until our Board identified a key leverage point: incorporating our social business objectives into the CEO’s incentive pay. That turned out to be the difference-maker.
COLLABORATION -
As the world’s leading chemical company, BASF has products in all kinds of industries; it employs 112,000 employees globally, services a variety of customers, and has relationships with shareholders and a large numbers of societal stakeholders. Any company’s set of relevant stakeholders in business, government and civil society will change with time; a clear picture is essential for effective engagement. Rather than relying on inflexible stakeholder mapping tools, it might be more appropriate to have skilled people and organizational structures in place for ongoing stakeholder analysis and engagement.
PRODUCT, SERVICE & DESIGN INNOVATION -
2016 is the centennial of the National Park Service (NPS), and in February the agency got a present from the biggest tech company in the world – or, more accurately, the world got a present from Google and the NPS: On February 11th, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell hosted an event at the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site to announce a Public-Private Partnership between Google and the NPS.
PRESS RELEASE -
Earth Day marks the official signing of the Paris Climate Agreement at the United Nations (U.N.) New York headquarters. The Paris deal paves the way for a new era of clean energy growth, providing crucial momentum for the push toward net zero emissions — a goal that requires the near-ubiquitous use of renewables.
The good news: There’s been ample progress to that end. And it appears to be the tipping point for widespread adoption.
Renewable energy has spread across the globe
SUPPLY CHAIN -
This Sunday, April 24th, will mark the third anniversary of the tragic Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, when workplace health and safety failures cost 1,134 people their lives and injured many others.
THE NEXT ECONOMY -
Ethical Markets Media has revealed a stunning new total for its Green Transition Scoreboard® (GTS), a metric that tracks private investments and commitments in creating more sustainable economies globally, showing the weight investors place on clean technologies driving the future of business and finance. The GTS’ goal is to see $10 trillion privately invested in the clean economy by 2020 to effectively scale innovations and reduce costs in sustainable technologies.
CLEANTECH -
This Friday, world leaders will convene to sign the Paris Climate Agreement. The international regulatory environment and national policies to curb emissions are reshaping global markets. Decarbonization could define the 21st century economy. But what do these changes mean for businesses?
STAKEHOLDER TRENDS AND INSIGHTS -
At BP’s 2015 Annual General Meeting (AGM), 4.12 percent of the company’s investors either ‘abstained’ (2.4 percent) or voted ‘against’ (1.72 percent) a resolution to better disclose carbon risk. The remainder (96 percent) got the publicity for supporting the resolution, as the board (in a move of alignment with resolution filers) recommended. But as we approach the 2016 voting season, we need to understand why 4 percent of investors would take the step of either abstaining over this board-recommended resolution, or voting against it.
LEADERSHIP -
Two decades ago, John Elkington introduced the Triple Bottom Line (TBL), a disruptive corporate tool to measure a company’s success based on three Ps: People, Planet and Profit. TBL and its derivatives are widely used by companies around the world. While some companies have embedded the TBL into the core of their business, many others loosely practice it to varying degrees.
ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE -
A new UN-backed initiative is enlisting the help of female execs across the world to bring climate change concerns into boardrooms.
CLEANTECH -
A consortium of leading financial institutions and investors today announced a new partnership under the Catalytic Finance Initiative (CFI), to direct $8 billion in total commitments toward high-impact sustainability investments.
SUPPLY CHAIN -
I was fortunate enough to visit Manila in the Philippines recently for an interesting summit that was held by the Asian Development Bank and supported by CSR Asia. The event brought together a diverse group of participants from government, investment organizations, and people who work on the ground helping facilitate Inclusive Business (IB). IB can be seen as a variant of social entrepreneurship where large firms work to reduce the risk around partnerships with bottom of the pyramid entrepreneurs by treating them as part of the company that they serve.
NEW METRICS -
That investing to make a positive impact as well as a dime has evolved considerably over the past few years has turned on its head a long-standing worldview that the sole purpose of business and investing is to make money, while solving social and environmental challenges is the domain of government and charity.
While some may remain skeptical that for-profit investment can be both a morally legitimate and economically effective way to address social and environmental problems, impact investing is moving swiftly from concept to convention.