Pew Centre, October 11, 2011 - Climate
change-and efforts to mitigate it-are creating an increasingly
uncertain future for businesses.
The long-term effects of a warming climate are enormously
difficult to predict, but in the near term, new policies,
technologies, and market preferences are already altering the
competitive landscape of entire industries.
Today's policy environment, particularly in the United States,
is creating an extraordinarily uncertain environment for business
decision-making. In the face of such uncertainties, corporate
executives must still make decisions that affect their company's
strategy and competitive opportunities for years.
A number of companies have successfully identified, developed, and
launched low-carbon innovations, and their experiences offer
valuable lessons for others with similar opportunities.
The Pew Center's Business of Innovating: Bringing Low-Carbon
Solutions to Market report will outline the unique challenges
and opportunities for low-carbon innovation, and will describe
seven best practices that companies are using to bring low-carbon
solutions to market.
The research project included a detailed innovation survey of BELC members and other
leading companies, a series of BELC workshops,
broader research on innovation, and in-depth case studies of eight
low-carbon innovation projects from four large multinational
companies:
- Alstom SA
- Daimler AG
- Hewlett-Packard Company
- Johnson Controls, Inc.
The report presents a set of practical lessons for organizations
pursuing low-carbon innovation strategies.
The results should be of interest to corporate decision-makers
who are developing or considering low-carbon innovation strategies
and to others seeking to understand how companies can effectively
bring low-carbon innovations to market, including financial
analysts, institutional investors, state and federal officials,
non-governmental organizations (NGOs), scholars, and participants
in international efforts to address climate change.
The report is being authored by Andrew Hargadon, the Charles J. Soderquist
Chair in Entrepreneurship and Professor of Technology Management at
the Graduate School of Management at University of California.
He is the author of How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising
Truth About How Companies Innovate (Harvard Business School Press
2003).