BUS604: Innovation and Sustainability

The Commission is committed to supporting businesses of any scale, scope, sector, or geography that want to join with us in making this shift happen fast. Over the next year, we plan to do so by: 

1. Nurturing and mentoring the next generation of sustainable development leaders. Many of us, as CEOs and leaders, have had to develop new ideas, leadership skills, and tools to lead our businesses through the challenges and opportunities of sustainable growth. We would like to reach out to another 500-1,000 CEOs (and future CEOs) to share what we have learned and provide peer support to those who choose to make sustainable growth central to their business strategy. We will offer our own time and that of our firm's leaders for peer conversations on the business case and the transformational leadership needed. We will engage with business schools and other learning providers to give an informed view on what combination of knowledge, experience, action planning, digital learning, and cohort support best equips CEOs and future CEOs for sustainable leadership. And we will ensure that learning programmes within our businesses include sustainable leadership content.
2. Creating sectoral transformation roadmaps. The Commission will work with sectors to create sectoral transformation roadmaps for up to five key sectors, as outlined in Section 3. In each case, members of the Commission from within that sector will take the lead on assembling a group of peer CEOs and other key stakeholders in a coalition. We will support those coalitions in creating a vision of what their sector should look like by 2030 if the Global Goals are treated as a strategic framework for better growth, and what actions and changes sector players can take to get there quickly and fairly.
   In some cases, the best way to move forward will be cross-sectoral, as new technologies and business models break down traditional ways of doing business. This could mean new coalitions will emerge, for example, on externality pricing, bringing together players with different interests to find the most cost-effective ways of protecting natural capital. It could feed into greater use of digital platforms to accelerate break-through, such as XPRIZE, which invites its online audience to compete to solve the world's biggest problems, awarding prizes to winners. The Commission will use its cross-sectoral membership to support such catalytic ideas, which could create new market-based means of reaching Global Goals targets.
3. Creating Global Goal league tables. In parallel, the Commission will also work with others in the financial sector to create publicly available Global Goal league tables. These will rank corporate performance sector by sector against relevant Global Goals and establish sector sustainability benchmarks. Our vision is to turn the analysis of sustainability reporting data into a publicly available resource, empowering citizens and civil society to use it. In the league tables, companies would be ranked on their performance across a range of indicators including climate change, gender equality, supply chain labour standards (including modern day slavery), and access to healthcare. The process of building the league tables must be collaborative, with input from civil society, investors, and independent rating providers on the methodology, as well as companies. It will take time to build up the right metrics and quality of data.
   Companies that comprehensively and successfully incorporate sustainable growth in their strategies will benefit in the competition to attract investors as their impact becomes visible to all, creating the "race to the top" that will accelerate progress towards the Global Goals.
4. Supporting measures to unlock additional finance needed to achieve the Global Goals. The Commission will do this by advocating for new and different kinds of public and private sector engagement in sustainable infrastructure, an expansion in the capital base of multilateral development banks and development finance institutions (both bilateral and domestic), and the creation of a global, liquid asset class for infrastructure investments.
   The Commission will also mobilize a task-force of leading institutional investors, sovereign wealth funds, development finance institutions, and private companies to lay out a potential blended finance action plan for delivering the Global Goals. Its aim will be to answer the question: "What is the most efficient way to mobilize the incremental US$2.4 trillion a year needed to deliver the Global Goals?".
5. Exploring the idea of an independently compiled Responsible Political Engagement Index. To guide companies, this would set out the principles of transparent and fair political engagement. Companies would disclose their performance against these criteria and an independent body, such as Transparency International, could compile rankings.

The world has 13 years before the deadline it has set itself for achieving the Global Goals. Company leaders will never have a better moment in which to align their business objectives with creating a better world.