Best Practices of Environmental Front-Runners: A study investigating how and why enterprises have established an environmental leadership position
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Typ
Examensarbete för masterexamen
Program
Publicerad
2022
Författare
Karlsson, Filip
Murgård, Karl
Modellbyggare
Tidskriftstitel
ISSN
Volymtitel
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Sammanfattning
Sustainability and the environmental impact of organizations have received significantly
increasing attention over the last decades. The transition towards more sustainability focused
business models impacts all companies but also creates opportunities to strengthen the
competitiveness and the brand image by being superior in terms of sustainability
performance. Sustainability, and especially environmental sustainability, has been a major
focus area for academics for a long time. However, limited attention has been given on the
variations between industries in terms of what factors that impacts the value creation from
sustainability and the underlying rationales for being an environmental front-runner.
Therefore, the purpose of this report was to investigate industry-specific best practices for
how large, environmentally leading firms have established their position as environmental
front-runners. By doing so, the objective was to identify how the industries differ and what
industry-specific factors that are leading to the potential differences. The purpose of the report
was fulfilled by a multiple-case study where several environmentally leading companies from
the automotive and life science industry were investigated. The result of the study shows that
the objective for companies from both industries is to establish a competitive advantage from
their environmental focus. However, the companies from the automotive industry are to a
higher extent seeking financial advantages when establishing themselves as environmental
front-runners. On the other hand, companies in the life science industry are to a higher extent
driven by a desire to do good for the society in combination with building company resilience
and attracting employees as well as business partners, and do not see the same financial
benefits. It is seen that the financial performance is of great importance in the life science
industry as well but compared to the automotive industry the higher purpose of the business
was concluded to be a more important driver in the reasoning behind positioning the company
as an environmental front-runner.
Moreover, the study shows that the way companies work with sustainability is similar between
the two industries. It is concluded that the interviewed environmental front-runners have
started off by focusing on integrating sustainability in the core strategy. To further improve the
sustainability maturity, the focus has been to integrate sustainability into the whole company.
Finally, to achieve the highest level of sustainability maturity, companies has targeted to
extend the sustainability focus to also include the surrounding ecosystem and thereby focus
on the value created for the whole society and not only the individual company.
Beskrivning
Ämne/nyckelord
sustainability , environmental leadership , sustainability best practice , sustainability strategy , environmental front-runner , environmental value creation