AltaTerra Research

Press Release: AltaTerra Research and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) are pleased to announce the release of a new conference report featuring key takeaways from SVLG’s March 2010 conference, “The Sustainable Corporation 2010: Solutions from the Innovation Economy.” This report highlights sustainable business approaches of some of the world’s most innovative companies, including: HP, eBay, Samsung, Flextronics, Applied Materials, IBM, Intel, Yahoo, Kaiser Permanente, Adobe, Accenture, Nvidia, and many others. Key conference takeaways are captured in the report, addressing leading practices in consortia participation, stakeholder reporting, procurement and supply chain initiatives, operational improvements, and top-line growth through green innovation.

A number of common themes emerged across multiple conference panels and presentations: 

Corporate response to sustainability will create winners and losers. Companies that fundamentally integrate sustainability into their strategy will have greater access to capital, talent, and natural resources.   

Green is not a fad. New requirements for environmentally preferable products and services are driven by fundamental, transformational forces in the global marketplace, including rising standards of living, resource costs and supply limitations, global energy, climate, environmental regulations, new stakeholder and competitive pressures, and rising customer expectations. 

Stakeholder pressure for transparency is growing. The development of social networks has enabled the creation of “pop-up stakeholders,” a shifting network of nongovernmental organizations and other interests that come together outside of institutional structures. For corporations, this represents both a threat and an opportunity.   

Green markets are vast. Across virtually all industries, significant opportunities exist for innovation and competitive differentiation to improve the resource efficiency and environmental performance of products. 

Sustainable product innovation takes many forms. Green innovation involves improvements to existing products or development of fundamentally new products. Clean technology startups are generally pursuing market innovation, while established players are investing in greening existing product lines and customer offerings and developing breakthrough market innovations. 

Employees are a source of power. By leveraging employee engagement, companies are able to find and deliver on innovation, both in internal operations and in the marketplace.   

Change takes time. Large-scale changes in operations and product lines take time. A realistic time for launching meaningful corporate sustainability efforts might be 18 months, with some results in 4 to 5 years and results at scale in 10 years. 

“In the space of just a few years, the notion of sustainability has expanded to impact corporate buying and selling functions around the world. Customers are articulating new ‘green’ requirements, and increasingly, suppliers are seeking to define and differentiate their products on this basis. Corporate sustainability is rapidly becoming its own force in the global marketplace,” said Don Bray, President of AltaTerra Research. 

“The report offers quantifiable and useful measures for incorporating sustainable practices into any business model,” commented Bob Hines, Vice President, General Counsel and Energy Director at SVLG.