Lecture 2

Strategic issues concerning yoghurt’s cups for Danone

Pb with plastic :

brand image

regulation (material, waste management)

industrial pressure (costs). Find an alternative material can be costly. e.g. glass is
heavier : implication in terms of costs.

Market pressure → demand’s criteria

So, you have two contradictory criteria cost & market pressure and brand image. If you
have something sustainable +++ but very costly nobody will buy it. But you loose
consumers if not sustainable.

How could Danone use innovation to overcome these issues

Technical innovation

Product use / innovation

Social innovation

Process innovation

Business Model innovation : when you change the way you make money from the
product

There is always a debate about is it innovative or not, the most important thing is to
precise why you think it is innovative and at which scale it is innovative
Opened debate : should companies start to produce / sell less.

Lecture 2 1
 I - Sustainability challenges for business
and innovation
Who should act first? Consumers? Politicians? Companies?
Sustainable development: concept has evolved since 1987, and been criticized. Main
criticism : it has been used by companies for greenwashing
Sustainable development has been translated by companies into Corporate Social
Responsibility (CSR). To use it, companies start with Identifying who your main
stakeholders are, how your activities impact them (consumers but also society as a
whole) and how you can improve the impact of your activities on them.
Ranking : intéressant parce que apple, bnp paribas, coca : dans les companies les plus
“engaged” dans l’environnement alors qu’elles ont été très critiquées pour leur impact
sur l’environnement. Be careful : this ranking measures “engagement” in environment.
But engaged, how ? We need to measure the impact of this engagement (+ or -) to have
a relevant ranking
For example if we focus on carbon neutrality engagement (next slide) not many
companies are well engaged in reaching this objective
Limits of traditional CSR

Greenwashing

Business model inconsistencies

Indirect contribution to intense consumption : if you need to sell more and more for
your business to continue runing, ethically discussable

Toward new paradigms ?

Eco-centrism : paradigm, human not superior to the rest of the environment - quite
different from what we experience everyday, and difficult to implement with current
business models

pb with vinted : encourages people to sell more bcs they know they can sell on vinted

Lecture 2 2
 II - Sustainable business and innovation

Stakeholders that you take into account

If you take the eco-centrism paradigm, you can consider that even nature can be
considered as a stakeholder
you have to respect a natural limit in order to allow for regeneration (toward a
regenerative economy) → use less can in fact allow you to have more
“ecology-proofed” managemenet : explores the kind of business model / organization
structure that you can develop to be ecologically proofed

So a company can have a lot of stakeholders in its scope and it can be hard to include
them all at the same level → use the stakeholder map → two types of indicators : power
/ influence of stakeholder and the level of interest of stakeholder.

III - Case study

Social utility
includes environmental impact

impact of a company on the local territory

mainly of economy social et solidaire : they need to prove they have a social impact so
they use this indicator

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