20 sustainable corporate venture examples
Sustainable corporate ventures are rarely a leap away from the business. Most use assets the company already has to open an adjacent market that happens to be cleaner. Twenty ventures here are tagged on five criteria so you can see the pattern.
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33 pages · PDF and online- Twenty sustainable corporate ventures, tagged on five comparable criteria
- How each one was built: from scratch, by investment, or through partnership
- Where the commercial value sits, and what it does for the parent brand
Sustainability pays when it is adjacent, not heroic.
The ventures here are not moonshots. Two in three sit next to the parent's existing offering, most sell to other businesses, and the largest single theme is making a supply chain work better. The commercial case comes first and the sustainability follows from it.
are built on B2B transactions rather than consumer-facing ones
sit adjacent to the parent's core offering, not far from it
target supply chain optimisation as their route to sustainability
years, the average age of a sustainable corporate venture
Figures describe the twenty ventures analysed in this report.
The question is not how ambitious your sustainability venture is. It is which asset you already own that makes it commercial.
Twenty ventures, tagged on five criteria.
The same five tags are applied to every venture, so you can compare structure and business model rather than read twenty stories.
Decide how the venture comes into being
- 1Built from scratchCreated inside the company
- 2InvestmentBacked rather than built
- 3PartnershipBuilt with someone who already can
Decide what kind of sustainability you are selling
- 4Reuse and recycleValue from what already exists
- 5Circular economyDesigned to come back
- 6Sharing economyAccess instead of ownership
- 7Process automationLess waste through better running
- 8Supply chain optimisationThe largest single theme in the set
Decide who actually pays
- 9B2BSelling to other businesses
- 10B2CSelling through the usual channels
- 11D2CSelling direct
Decide how far from the business it sits
- 12CoreInside what the company already does
- 13AdjacentNext to it, using the same assets
- 14RadicalA genuinely new market
Decide what the venture runs on
- 15ElectrificationMoving off fossil energy
- 16Power gridMaking distribution work harder
- 17AgricultureFood and land systems
- 18Carbon captureTaking emissions back out
- 19BiotechBuilding materials biologically
Built to find the commercial case.
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