Sustainability is Not a Fad, says Silicon Valley Research

Sustainability is a long-term business interest, not a fly-by-the-night fad, according to a report by AltaTerra Research, Palo Alto, California, in conjunction with the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. AltaTerra Research is a research consultancy specializing in sustainable business and the commercial marketplace for clean technology solutions.

Their research finds that new requirements for environmentally preferable products and services are driven by fundamental, transformational forces in the global marketplace. These forces include rising standards of living, resource costs and supply limitations, global energy, climate, environmental regulations, new stakeholder and competitive pressures, and rising customer expectations.

As a result, the market for sustainability products and services are vast and stretch across virtually all industries. According to AltaTerra, companies that fundamentally integrate sustainability into their strategy will have greater access to capital, talent, and natural resources.  

And green can be unpredictable. Green innovation involves improvements to existing products or development of fundamentally new products. Clean technology startups, for instance, generally pursue market innovation, while established players invest in greening existing product lines and customer offerings and develop breakthrough market innovations.

Employees and customers seek the green story

Stakeholders and company employees are proving to be forces for change, according to AltaTerra.

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.

Beyond that, companies are turning to their own employees. By leveraging employee engagement, companies are able to deliver on innovation, both in internal operations and in the marketplace.

It is important to remember, though, that change takes time. Large-scale changes in operations and product lines can be a long-term process. A realistic time for launching meaningful corporate sustainability efforts might be 18 months. And results might not be visible for four to five years—while other results may not happen for closer to a decade.

“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.

For the full report, which highlights sustainable business approaches of a variety of heavy hitters, including HP, eBay, Samsung, Flextronics, Applied Materials, IBM, Intel, Yahoo, Kaiser Permanente, Adobe, Accenture, and Nividia, see altaterra.site-ym.com