As the global Sustainable Brands community keeps on growing, the conversations we host and catalyze on our digital platform are evolving, as well. To reflect this evolution, we are announcing a refreshed list of topics that matter the most to our community — a new set of 20 channels around which we will frame our editorial content in 2014, and beyond. These updated channels reflect the growing sophistication of corporate sustainability efforts in our global network, while also allowing readers to sort and navigate key conversations easily. For future reference, this list also lives full-time on our Editorial Channels page. Happy browsing and here is to another step in advancing our shared mission!
1. Blazing the Trail: Leadership, Intrapreneurship & Ethics
Directing a company to sustainable long-term success takes a forward-looking allocation of resources, a holistic systems-aligned strategy, and — by necessity — a new set of skills. This channel highlights exemplary cases of leadership and intrapreneurship, along with the ethical principles or dilemmas they raise. #leadership #changeagent #bizstrategy
2. Waste Not: Striving for Net Positivity
In order to achieve true sustainability, we need an economy that renders the concept of waste obsolete — an economy that is at least circular, and at best regenerative or net positive. This channel synthesizes the inspiring momentum of the growing number of efforts directed at reducing, and ultimately eliminating, all kinds of waste. #wastenot #netpositive
3. Brand Innovation: Aiming to Disrupt and Delight
In a business environment characterized by complexity, high speed and 24/7 visibility, it is more challenging and rewarding than ever to earn enduring trust and admiration. This channel explores sustainability as an innovation imperative for brands, highlighting opportunities for purpose-driven brand values, strategies and actions. #brandinnovation #brandstrategy
4. Marketing & Communications
From our perspective, "brand" is who you are, what you do, how you do it, and only then, how you communicate it. This channel examines how today's leading brands are evolving in the area of sustainability marketing and communications through thought-provoking ads, creative mission marketing, social media campaigns and other successful stakeholder engagement. #comms #marketing
5. New Metrics: Redefining the Value of Business
If businesses are to succeed in tomorrow’s economy, the metrics by which they define and measure success must evolve. This channel helps demystify many challenges around sustainability metrics by analyzing leading-edge New Metrics projects that are expanding the way business creates, quantifies, manages and reports the value it delivers. #newmetrics #roi
6. Products & Design
While ambitious visions are essential to every sustainability journey, nothing brings lofty principles to life quite like already-existing, visible results. This channel introduces real, in-the-market products and services that deliver on sustainability promises. It also covers vital supporting design work powering innovation for sustainability on all fronts. #sustainabledesign
7. Business Model Innovation
Choosing the right path to sustainable customer delight is no trivial task. After all, you have to arrive at a business model that delivers on customer expectations AND is radical enough to make a dent in pressing sustainability challenges of the day. This channel discusses note-worthy principles, methodologies, processes and tools used in business model innovation around the globe. #businessmodel
8. Social & Environmental Entrepreneurship
All over the world, mission-driven entrepreneurs are bringing fresh, disruptive ideas to market in response to social, environmental and economic challenges. This channel chronicles some of our favorites, each representing a potentially game-changing offering that could dramatically alter the context in which it operates. #socent #startup
9. Organizational Change
Getting employees united around a sustainability agenda pays dividends on many levels. It generates excitement, loyalty, creativity, productivity and, ultimately, profit. This channel shares creative strategies and tools leading practitioners are using to engage their teams in building motivated market-leading brands. #employeeengagement #humancapital #changemanagement
10. Stakeholder Trends & Insights
With increasing awareness of both current and imminent crises, societies around the world are changing their attitudes, behavior and consumption patterns. Through a variety of survey data, ethnographic studies, expert reports, white papers and other analyses, this channel tracks all types of stakeholder engagement with brands' environmental and social sustainability programs. #consumertrends #marketresearch
11. Behavior Change
Shifting to a sustainable economy requires a new kind of brand-customer relationship — one that enables choice-editing for the best personal, societal and planetary impact, all while indulging customers in delightful products and services that meet their needs. This channel focuses on the latest developments supporting a shift toward sustainable consumption, as well as specific ways brands are encouraging less wasteful behaviors. #behaviorchange #sustliving
12. Collaboration & Co-Creation
Driving the systemic changes necessary for us to flourish — both as people and as businesses — requires more capabilities than any organization, regardless of size, can achieve alone. It requires new types of partnerships, be they cross-functional, cross-sector, or otherwise inclusive of all necessary expertise. This channel follows the growing amount of collaborative work bringing about massive, disruptive, needed shifts to business-as-usual. #collaboration #cocreation
13. Defining the Next Economy
While many recognize that capitalism is significantly flawed, coming up with a practical, alternative economic framework that fixes all bugs has proven a mammoth challenge. This channel is devoted to the brilliant minds making progress in ‘changing the game’ by identifying viable features of a thriving global economy delivering health, dignity and happiness to all involved. Here's to the next economy. #nexteconomy #consciouscapitalism
14. ICT and Big Data
Few things generate more media buzz these days than the promises of Big Data analytics, or advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) in general. Virtually every industry is watching closely, and a lot is at stake for many tech-dependent business processes. This channel sheds light on key applications in sustainability-related work, whether in operations, manufacturing, supply chain logistics, predictive customer analytics, or life cycle analysis. #ict #bigdata #analytics
15. Supply Chain
Creating efficient, healthy, resilient and transparent supply chains is central to any corporate sustainability journey. This channel tackles the myriad issues that can arise in any supply chain, and treats them as either risks or opportunities, depending on the ways they are being managed. #supplychain #valuechain
16. Chemistry & Materials
Design experimentation and product innovation for sustainability would be impossible without underlying scientific advances coming out of research labs dedicated to chemical, mechanical and materials engineering. This channel covers green chemistry, new materials and fuels, GMOs and more — all in all, a remarkable set of leading indicators extending the realm of possibilities in meeting the world’s needs. #greenchemistry #greenmaterials
17. Purchasing & Procurement
Anyone who has spent serious thought and effort on sustainable procurement would know that, even though it may seem straightforward conceptually, procurement comes with a world of complexity of its own. Evolving government policies, technical possibilities, market conditions and stakeholder relationships are all constantly influencing — directly or indirectly — buyers and sellers alike. This channel zooms in on sustainable purchasing and procurement news for anyone looking to stay up-to-date with movers and shakers in the space. #procurement
18. Packaging
Most people know not to judge a book by its cover, but we can’t say the same about products and packaging. In fact, not only do customers and other stakeholder sometimes judge a product by its packaging, but often a significant chunk of the environmental and social impacts associated with products stem from their packaging. This channel highlights companies, materials and processes that are revolutionizing the traditional, often wasteful, approach to packaging products. #greenpackaging
19. Cleantech
The global cleantech industry — including, but not limited to, alternative energy generation — is growing by the minute and holds the answers to many corporate sustainability questions. This channel takes us on a journey through the diverse set of cleantech applications and explains how the latest products and services tackle problems around energy, water, waste, transportation, ecosystem monitoring, population dynamics, social tensions and behavior change. #cleantech
20. Sustainability Solutions
This channel features reports and case studies examining a range of sustainable solutions through the lens of Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives, a program within Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability. The series is curated by top-notch ASU experts and aims to highlight real-world solutions conceived and implemented in diverse organizational, geographical, political and cultural settings.
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Published Jan 21, 2014 4pm EST / 1pm PST / 9pm GMT / 10pm CET