A regular blog about (un) sustainable business. A focus on practical stuff, not blue sky pretentious waffle. Around 6000 regular readers, surprisingly.
In case you missed our webinar on human rights risk management with Thai Union, Nestle and Intel that took place last Friday, you can find the webinar recording here to listen to at your leisure: http://bit.ly/2bIWuXy Also, we are running two relevant conferences on human rights and business in London and Washington DC that may be of…
Dearest reader, I hope you are rather well, Innovation Forum is holding a complimentary webinar on human rights risk management approaches with Intel, Nestle and Thai Union this Friday. We’d like to invite you to join in. The webinar is taking place this Friday 19th August. The discussion will explore collaboration and partnership approaches being…
Here below are four recent podcasts we taped at events we at Innovation Forum held earlier this year. The focus is all about smallholder farmers and how companies can better engage them, tackle capacity challenges, improve yields and overcome the limits to certification. (Many more podcasts can be found here) And this upcoming conference should…
The US government has recognised improvements in tackling trafficking in Thailand’s seafood sector, but the endemic labour abuses will be tough to eradicate From Innovation Forum’s weekly business newsletter. Sign up free at: http://innovation-forum.co.uk In issuing its updated Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report, the US Department of State upgraded the country from a “tier 3” to “tier 2”…
Big food and FMCG brands and retailers have set important and game-changing targets in sustainable agriculture. Achieving these are amongst the biggest challenges that companies face in the next decade. Much has been done in recent years, but we’re a long way from overall success. So how will companies get there ‘on time’? Which techniques,…
At Innovation Forum we’re now helping companies understand risk in a cost effective way, that’s not just through edgy, focused conferences which get to the heart of the issues. Several companies has asked us to provide them with a quarterly, cost effective risk briefing service via PDF report, and face to face meetings. These focus…
Here’s the latest of the podcast series Scott Poynton, founder of TFT (The Forest Trust) and I are doing this year. In this edition we talked about the demise of the Indonesian Palm Oil Pledge, the IOI vs. RSPO lawsuit closure, Resolute vs. Greenpeace (briefly), why talking to critics is really the best way. We…
There are a few questions in the world of responsible business which always get attention. These are the thorny, difficult, riddled-with-potential-conflict-of-interest-and-controversy questions. One of them is: “How should companies responsibly engage and persuade Governments to think longer term in a sustainable way?” Another is this, the title of this post: “Should business defend environmental and human…
The case of an activist being supported by a Finnish company testifying against a former supplier in Thailand shows how the progressive business landscape is changing Relationships between companies and campaigners have evolved over the last few years. Still often adversaries, multinationals and NGOs now also work together towards common sustainability goals. Now, a case…
As we move into the summer break, here are some upcoming meetings from Innovation Forum that readers might want to think about coming to later in 2016. Remember, we take away all the boring bits of conferences and emphasise the useful. So our events are all about debate, the right people in the room, focus,…
Yesterday I took part in a webinar hosted by Forest Trends / Supply Change and our company, Innovation Forum. Our brief was to discuss progress made on tacking deforestation in corporate supply chains. I made a few remarks in an attempt to offer some challenge to current thinking, and to think about where we need…
It’s easy for companies keen to promote sustainability and resilience in their supply chains to neglect the potential of relationships with donor agencies, NGOs and governments. But if scale is the goal, collaboration is clearly the method. But these two words, scale and collaboration, are hugely over-used and not always well understood. To cut through…
“Everyone loves a good webinar”. That’s what my dear old grandmother used to say. Actually, she didn’t. For her the internet was something that happened to other people. But she would have loved this one, as she was a big fan of deforestation-free supply chains (that’s true, she spent a lot of time in Malaysia…
IPOP has been disbanded, but despite its demise companies say they will stick to their commitments The Indonesian Palm Oil Pledge is no more. The six palm oil multinationals that comprised its signatories said on 1st July that they would phase out the arrangement because “recent groundbreaking policy developments in Indonesia have fulfilled the purpose of…
There is a massive need to address agriculture’s impacts, but existing initiatives aren’t ambitious enough Looking at food production statistics can be depressing. In the United States in 2015, some 9bn chickens were raised for their meat. The corn and soy used to feed them amounted to more than 57m tonnes. In China in 2013, 715m…
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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