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Heart, S Indicators, Open Source

  • 1.  Heart, S Indicators, Open Source

    Posted 07-11-2010 10:02
    On Jul 11, 2010, at 12:00 AM, ONE-L automatic digest system wrote:
    1. The Barbaric Heart, Sustainability, Education, and Beauty
     2. Tell me a story... (2)
     3. Sustainability-related case study suggestions?

    There are many ideas in these conversation streams that are worth pursuing.  Let me push on one that has emerged in parallel at the Montreal Finance & Sustainability Initiative that our Centre is orchestrating.  This is about sustainability indicators and metrics at the organizational, regional and national levels.  There are some initiatives seeking to create a stock exchange for social mission driven enterprises (global impact investing).   One of the needs identified is Open Source  development of an information infrastructure that provides the metrics for measuring social and environmental performance.  Having good indicators/metrics would be essential for capital to move towards sustainable investments.  

    There are a number of metrics databases  GlobScan, GRI, TruCost, TRI, and many others that provide some enterprise level data, and country level data - some private, some public.  I ran across this recent report by the World Federation of Exchanges (www.world-exchanges.org) entitled "Exchanges and sustainable investment."  (http://www.world-exchanges.org/files/focus/pdf/FOCUS 0610.pdf).  They build the case for the need to include environmental as well as social impacts in the evaluation of companies and means to measure them. Note that on top of page 5 they state "Second, a framework for a truly integrated report needs to be established since currently none exists."  

    I am interested in understanding opportunities and challenges of "open source" development of such sustainability metrics.  In Evolutionary Biology and Astronomy fields open source "crowd science" is being used to develop information about species, and space respectively.  Is such development feasible in enterprise sustainability?  Is this something that B-school researchers from accounting, finance, ecological economics, and ONE should be/could be leading?


    With Best Regards,
    paul S.

    Paul Shrivastava, Ph. D.
    David O'Brien Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Enterprise, and
    Director, David O'Brien Center for Sustainable Enterprise


    John Molson School of Business
    Concordia University
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