A regular blog about (un) sustainable business. A focus on practical stuff, not blue sky pretentious waffle. Around 6000 regular readers, surprisingly.
Here below are some recent analysis and podcasts from us at Innovation Forum. It’s all free. You don’t need to register or anything. Just click and enjoy. We’ve got a lot coming up in the second half of 2017 and if you enjoy our analysis, please consider attending one of our events and supporting our…
Picture, if you will, a recent, anonymised example of this headline in action. A company made an inappropriate response to legitimate questions. This was over-reacted to, by a charity, which behaved similarly. The company then responded, again in a way which they should have realised could inflame things. All the while, a media and cash-hungry campaign…
Ahead of two business conferences coming up on tackling deforestation in business supply chains in Jakarta in October and London in November, I spoke with Rob Bailes, associate director at consultants Robertsbridge, who are sponsoring both events, about the subject. His firm works with many of the leading companies in the space, helping them develop…
Yes that’s a bit of a clickbait headline. Sorry. But it’s also a question one still hears being asked at senior levels in large companies. Those asking it aren’t particularly immoral people, as far as I know. It’s just that their day to day lives aren’t filled with information about what human rights means for…
As some readers may know, business and human rights, and forced labor and human trafficking are a big area of focus for us at Innovation Forum. I recall first hosting a conference on this topic in 2003, and much has changed since, at least in terms of awareness. Looking at that 2003 agenda, here you can…
“Do a conference on oceans and human health”, said a good friend of mine to me a couple of years ago. “That’ll get people’s attention” he said, referring to the overall pollution crisis the world’s oceans face, which he and I care quite a lot about. We were discussing what it would take to drive…
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…
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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