Arthur D. Little helps companies integrate sustainability into their business strategies. We offer a comprehensive approach to sustainability that delivers real business benefits in the short and long term – our approach is rooted in strategy, technology and innovation.
We offer a comprehensive approach to sustainability that delivers real business benefits in short and long term – our approach is rooted in strategy, technology and innovation.
We do this in three particular ways:
Arthur D. Little’s global sustainability team offers a wide portfolio of services to help you integrate sustainability into your business strategy.
Steer company products & services portfolio towards sustainable value creation and high-growth areas (“sustainable portfolio management”)
We help you to define and build a comprehensive portfolio management set of tools that assesses the sustainability and technology performance of your products and services by application and region.
For more than a decade, Arthur D. Little has been supporting leaders in sustainability in developing sophisticated methods to objectively measure and compare sustainable performances of products, technologies and services.
This has allowed executives to proactively manage their product and technology portfolios and identify sustainability-related risks and opportunities ahead of competitors. In this way companies can steer their portfolios towards sustainable value creation and high-growth areas.
Sustainable Portfolio Management is of strategic value to companies in all sectors, and of particular importance to those that have less forward-looking insight into customer (including end-user) and value-chain buying and usage behavior, and into the performance of competing (novel) technologies.
Most important benefits as reported by users
1. “Faster growth, through improved focus of efforts”
2. “Credible communication on sustainability benefits, at both the portfolio and product level”
3. “Stronger stakeholder relationships, through intensive discussions on sustainability win-wins”
4. “Reduced risks, as risks are spotted earlier and managed transparently”
5. “Improved corporate image, supporting, e.g., marketing and recruitment efforts”
Arthur D. Little will ensure an unbiased and critical assessment of the product portfolio, proven to increase robustness of the SPM assessment. It is crucial for businesses to understand and communicate effectively & credibly, whether their solutions are contributing to sustainable development or perceived to be part of the problem. Stakeholders (e.g., investors, NGOs) often aim to compare sustainability performance of individual products or entire company product portfolios. The use of a non-compliant sustainability assessment methodology will generate unexplainable differences in sustainability performance due to methodological differences. In these cases, companies are said to “compete on metrics, rather than performance”, resulting in:
Arthur D. Little’s sustainable-products screening approaches, developed with our customers, are widely recognized and awarded
What customers say about Arthur D. Little’s work on sustainable-products screening
“Arthur D. Little has been instrumental in developing with Solvay its SPM methodology. It is unlikely that we would have been so successful in adoption and true steering of the product portfolio without them”
Dominique Debecker, Deputy Chief Sustainability Officer, Solvay
More information :
Sustainable Portfolio Management (SPM) by Solvay (video)
Sustainable Portfolio Management (SPM) by Solvay (brochure)
Sustainable Portfolio Management (SPM) by Solvay (guide, 60 pages)
We help companies manage carbon through five key steps:
Consolidating some 40 years' experience in advising clients on the opportunities and risks in sustainability, climate change and the carbon agenda, the Global Carbon Advisory Service (GCAS) maintains the leading-edge capabilities of the firm's global practices - both industry and functional.
We help manage the complexity and confusion surrounding carbon management debates driven by policy, consumers, supply chain, etc., for both companies and investors, by providing solutions that embrace this complexity and unlock value.
We can pull together environmental and economic policy drivers for carbon into something that makes corporate strategy development manageable.
We not only build on assurance, valuation and market analyses to address how carbon will affect the bottom line today, but also look at value created in tomorrow's markets while appreciating and understanding the role of discontinuities and step-changes in consumer requirements.
We help you assess your current and future carbon impact, and develop a strategy for addressing it. We help you design, pilot, roll out and integrate appropriate carbon management processes. We help you develop your energy-technology strategy and improve your energy efficiency.
We understand the role of emerging and potential technologies and mechanisms in addressing climate change, and have the breadth that is necessary in terms of timing, from short to long term, and geographically, with teams across Europe, the US and SE Asia, as well as measures that include energy supply, energy demand, efficiency and behavior.
Assess risks and opportunities: understand potential risks/opportunities relating to direct and indirect CO2 emissions & downstream product use
Identify strategic options: identify strategic options based on the company's current situation, market development and future ambitions
Develop investment strategy: develop strategy based on consideration of drivers of change and likely future carbon scenarios
Implement: manage risks and exploit carbon-related opportunities through selecting appropriate strategic options
Measure and report: measure and communicate carbon management performance
We help you understand and act upon stakeholder expectations and perceptions, using well-proven stakeholder management tools. We help you develop and implement realistic, but stretching, sustainability indicators. We help you verify your sustainability performance, and develop effective and balanced reports that are aligned with your business strategy.