Recently, LUISS Business School and Accenture Strategy offered us, MBA part time programme students, the opportunity to visit the 2015 Expo in Milan and to take part in a seminar held by Accenture on the sustainability. It was an exceptional experience.
The venue had a relevant role in making this experience unique. Moreover, my MBA classmates and I had the chance to spend quality time together, far from project works or exams preparation on a beautiful (and very hot) summer day, at the EXPO and we really appreciated. Finally yet importantly, we were guests within Accenture Strategy, a quite remarkable landlord to be hosted by. Accenture Strategy kindly opened the doors of their prestigious lounge and took us through a very interesting journey on sustainability and innovation.
Sustainability is often an abused word, but Accenture Strategy helped us understand and translate this sometimes-intangible concept into something very practical. They had rigorously showed how sustainability is strictly related to firms’ competitive advantage, and explained effectively how sustainability is going to eventually be one of the strongest driver of innovation in business. The discussion was very engaging.
Conducted by Accenture’s experts we had an overview on how major companies (for example Enel), as well as small firms, are redesigning their organizational structure in order to be more effective in managing the environmental impact of production and in order to meet investors’ requirements about risk mitigation. We were shown how new models of sharing among companies could provide expensive but strategic equipment to more firms of a business cluster, firms that individually could not afford them (for example 3D printers).
Clearly not being able to access such advance resources or accessing in delay may affect or even prevent the growth. We were guided through how top companies are transforming their processes with the aim of decoupling growth from resources usages. They explained how many different ways can make a business sustainable when switching from the old-fashioned linear growth model to the new concept of a circular economy models, where products are designed since the beginning to be sustainable (for instance choosing material on the basis of the potential reuse). Where industrial waste is turned into a resource, structures and equipment are refurbished and end-of-life products are disassembles and single components reused (e.g. Renault cars).
As MBA students, we were not only given a deeply valuable tool to understand the fast changing world in front of us. We were also proved that sustainability is a key aspect to improve our business of today as well as something crucial we need to think about when preparing, training and developing ourselves to be future leaders of innovation. I think this is basically what inspired all of us.
Pierluca Arietti
LUISS BS part-time MBA
