Books

Driving Sustainable Innovation

How to Do Well While Doing Good

The book offers a thought-provoking yet highly applicable resource for you and your organization to make sense of the future. It brings together a powerful collection of executives, thought leaders, practitioners, and researchers from around the world to map out what achieving truly sustainable innovation means for both individuals and organizations.

Driving Sustainable Innovation: How to Do Well While Doing Good offers a thought-provoking yet highly applicable resource for you and your organization to make sense of the future. It brings together a powerful collection of executives, thought leaders, practitioners, and researchers from around the world to map out what achieving truly sustainable innovation means for both individuals and organizations.

There is no doubt that the questions posed by Driving Sustainable Innovation are grand and challenging, but it offers an extensive reservoir of practical actions you can take now to be future-ready. Opening the book, Project Management Institute President and CEO Pierre Le Manh compellingly explains the challenge:

The world has been facing sustainability challenges for decades. But for a long time, we’ve been surrounded by a narrative that sustainability is a zero-sum game and that business leaders need to choose between doing what’s right for the planet and doing what’s right for their stakeholders. This is a false choice.

In fact, the quest for sustainability has proven to be a driving force behind innovation, brand relevance, and profitability across various sectors.

See the table of contents

Read the foreword

Watch the webinar

Get your copy

Buy on PMI Bookstore Buy on Amazon.com


Book Contents

The book is organized into five sections:

Begin With The Future

  • Future Solving for Profitable Good
    Brian Evergreen
  • A Tipping Point for Sustainability as the World Internalizes the Cost
    Kaihan Krippendorff and Cori Dombroski
  • New Management for New Times
    Richard Straub
  • On the Way to Save the World, Don’t Forget to Check Your Green Blindspot
    Ricardo Vargas and Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez
  • Environmental and Climate Impacts of the Metaverse
    Mark Esposito, Daphne Halkias, Terence Tse, and Jordi Diaz
  • In AI We Trust
    Hamilton Mann

Purpose-Driven Growth

  • Breaking the Paradox of Sustainable Growth
    Scott D. Anthony, Claudia Pardo,and Kelsey Beuning
  • Why Sustainability Is a Growth Multiplier
    Terence Mauri
  • Practices That Take Businesses’ Impact Beyond Profit
    Edivandro Conforto, Heather Ramsey, Jill Diffendal, and Emil Andersson
  • The Strategic Purpose of Sustainable Innovation
    Maïna K. M’Poyo
  • Delivering on Sustainability in a Sustainable Way
    Joel Carboni

Rethinking Innovation

  • Sustainable Business Model Innovation and the Power of Imagination
    Dave Young, Martin Reeves, and Adam Job
  • How to Sustainably Innovate by Continuously Focusing on the Utilization of Your Experts
    Christoph Hirnle, Debbie Summerville, and Thomas Quandt
  • For Sustainability, Work With Startups to Innovate!
    Jan Mattsson
  • Going on Offense to Innovate for Sustainability
    Behnam Tabrizi

Organizing For Sustainable Innovation

  • Transforming Your Organization to Support Sustainable Innovation
    Kristy Ellmer, Evelien Dupont, Alice Bolton, Maggie Schear, and Camila Noldin
  • Drive Sustainable Innovation and Transformation by Connecting the Dots
    Faisal Hoque
  • What It Takes to Make ESG Happen in Your Company
    Dan Toma
  • How Project Management Can Help Tackle World-Scale Challenges
    Lavagnon A. Ika and Lauchlan T. Munro
  • The Missing Agile Value
    Caroline Sauvé
  • People Are the Core of Sustainable Innovation
    Heidi J. Musser
  • Advocating a Culture of Organization Sustainability
    Giusi Meloni

Sustainable Innovation In Practice

  • Building the Future at Shimizu
    Stuart Crainer
  • Ørsted’s Green Business Transformation
    Ingrid Reumert
  • Sustainable Air Mobility Driven By a Human-Centered Approach
    Daniel Moczydlower and Marco Cesarino

Foreword

The world has been facing sustainability challenges for decades. But for a long time, we’ve been surrounded by a narrative that sustainability is a zero-sum game and that business leaders need to choose between doing what’s right for the planet and doing what’s right for their stakeholders.

This is a false choice. In fact, the quest for sustainability has proven to be a driving force behind innovation, brand relevance, and profitability across various sectors.

The results speak for themselves. In recent years, the world has seen many innovative sustainability solutions come to market. Innovations range from breakthroughs in renewable energy technologies to sustainable materials to the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in optimizing global supply chains and smart urban planning, among others. The pace of innovation is noteworthy, yet the journey toward a sustainable world is far from complete. We need to do more.

It is with this spirit that the Project Management Institute’s Brightline® Initiative team assembled Driving Sustainable Innovation: How to Do Well While Doing Good. The book brings together renowned practitioners, executives, and thought leaders from around the world and across industries to share their compelling experiences and ideas in the arena of sustainable innovation.

The result is a comprehensive and insightful compilation offering proven solutions and suggestions for leaders looking to harness the power of ingenuity to drive sustainability within their organizations. From historical insights to known best practices and future-focused solutions, the sections herein are designed to tell the story of sustainable innovation through a lens of practicality. You will be left with a clear understanding—and concrete examples—of how sustainability can coexist with and also drive innovation, growth, profit, and corporate strategy, and how we can prepare our organizations to address the societal upheavals that are approaching rapidly.

Achieving sustainable innovation certainly is a daunting challenge, but it is essential if we wish to safeguard the future of people, our planet, and the prosperity of our world. It is my hope that this indispensable guide aids you and your organization in its pursuit

Pierre Le Manh

President and CEO
Project Management Institute


Get your copy

Buy on PMI Bookstore Buy on Amazon.com


Book Launch Webinar

Watch the webinar that explored what leaders can do to drive and change their organizations through the lens of sustainability and innovation.

Webinar Panelists

  • Brian Evergreen, Author, Chief Executive Officer at The Future Solving Company
  • Kaihan Krippendorff, Founder, Outthinker Networks
  • Heidi J. Musser, Board Member and Board Advisor
  • Hamilton Mann, Group VP Digital Marketing and Digital Transformation at Thales
  • Alice Bolton, Partner and Associate Director at BCG
  • Marco Cesarino, Cofounder of Embraer-X, Head of Innovation Ecosystem-Latin America
  • Lenka Pincot, Chief of Staff to the CEO at Project Management Institute (PMI)
  • Edivandro Conforto, Director of Thought Leadership and Research at Project Management Institute (PMI)

Interviews with authors

We interviewed some of the book contributors to explore what leaders can do to drive and change their organizations through the lens of sustainability and innovation.

You can watch all interviews on the book playlist on Youtube.


Published on 18 June 2024, by Brightline Initiative, Thinkers50