A regular blog about (un) sustainable business. A focus on practical stuff, not blue sky pretentious waffle. Around 6000 regular readers, surprisingly.
Here’s some of the interviews, insight and analysis, recently added to https://innovation-forum.co.uk The below is a mixture of written and audio content, usually recorded at/around our events from the first half of 2017. I hope there’s some useful insights here somewhere for readers. Happy summer break to all! HSBC’s noble stand on palm oil No…
Last month we wrapped our final conference of the first half of 2017, during which we covered smallholder farmer sustainability, sustainable apparel, deforestation prevention, and tackling modern slavery and forced labour, (in both London and D.C), measuring sustainability processes and outcomes. All our conferences are held under the Chatham House rule of non-disclosure, but here are…
I read this today in a report I was sent: “In an article entitled The Relentless Pace of Automation, the MIT Technology Review indicates that in the United States, 83% of jobs earning less than $20 per hour have a likely risk of automation, compared to only 4% for jobs earning more than $40 per…
Here’s what we’re planning at Innovation Forum between now and the end of 2017. If you’d like to get involved just let us know at info@innovation-forum.co.uk or you can email me at tobias dot webb at innovation-forum.co.uk and I can send you on to one of our project directors. It should be an interesting remaining seven months…
We’ve written and held conference sessions on this above topic for a while now. And we’ll be covering it yet again in our business and human rights conference, held every year since 2014, which takes place again in London in November. (Hard to believe I first did one of these conferences in 2003. And yes,…
Here’s a quick update on our event ‘How apparel brands can transform supply chains’, taking place 13th-14th June in Amsterdam. Confirmed participants include senior representatives from the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, VF Corporation, H&M Group, Kering Group, Eileen Fisher, Inditex, Lindex, Levi’s, G-Star Raw, Cotton Connect, C&A Foundation, the ZDHC Foundation and more. With a particular focus…
A few weeks ago we held one of our “How business can tackle deforestation” conferences in Washington, D.C. I was a bit concerned beforehand because it was the third year of the event and I wondered if we’d have too much repetition of previous years issues, comments and speakers. Happily this turned out not to…
We had a fascinating discussion last night at London Business School at the CSR Meetup London, organised by Martin Summers, who has written some excellent guest blog posts for me, a few of which you can find here and here. For the topic of this post his most relevant contribution is probably this post on why…
Nick Kirby considers a recent conference on empowering smallholder farmers and how the lessons learned work on the ground The challenge of sourcing sustainably from smallholder farmers is as great as the distance from Diageo’s London headquarters to the coffee farms of Amazonas, Peru. Having recently made that trip after attending the Innovation Forum’s Sustainable Smallholder…
Here are some of the highlights from Innovation Forum’s audio channel over the past few months. To subscribe to the Innovation Forum webinar and podcast stream on iTunes click here. Business and deforestation – are companies going to meet their supply chain commitments? In this webinar, the findings from two new reports from Forest Trends’…
This year’s theme was “How to empower farmers and deliver business solutions at scale” and we brought together 150 company executives, NGOs and others on 14th-15th March 2017, London to discuss this. Here are some of what our session moderators found were the main points along with some links to relevant Innovation Forum podcasts on…
Here’s the latest brochure for our upcoming conference “How business can measure the impact – and ROI – of corporate sustainability” to be held on 21-22 June 2017 in London. This is one of those “Holy Grail” areas of corporate sustainability. Get this right, and we can convince any boardroom of the need for a…
Here’s a slide deck I wrote this week for a lecture at Kings College London, covering why companies should care about human rights, deforestation, agricultural sustainability, CSR and supply chain sustainability. It’s mostly pictures with captions and a conclusions slide at end. I hope it’s useful in some small way. Why Supply Chain Sustainability Matters…
The latest reports from TFA 2020 and Supply Change analyse corporate progress and track the latest trends around deforestation. (We’ll be debating these with 100+ experts from business and NGOs in D.C. April 3-4. Brochure here and conference website here.) In the webinar below, the findings from two new reports from Forest Trends’ Supply Change initiative and…
This is one of those “Holy Grail” questions in business and society. What do you say in that board meeting when that senior director asks “what kind of payback are we getting here?”. The obvious answer is to say: “It’s about hanging on to what we’ve got – and turning innovative ideas into cost savings…
I'm Toby Webb, founder of Innovation Forum, a sustainability focused research, publishing and events business. I've also been a lecturer on Corporate Responsibility at Kings College London and at Birkbeck, University of London for eight years. I work with large companies all over the world and sit on the sustainability advisory board for Walgreens Boots Alliance. From 2006-9 I lead the development of UK CSR policy, resulting in the Responsibility Deals framework. I can be contacted at Tobias DOT Webb AT innovation-forum.co.uk
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