Our Agenda
At CSI, our mission is to support the sustainability movement by focusing on the application and improvement of innovation in business. Of particular interest to us is the transformation of innovation processes in medium and large corporations from unsustainable patterns to sustainable ones. Our focus in this regard is more on innovation processes than outcomes, and on the capacity of an organization to sustainably learn.
Thus, our agenda is grounded in a view which sees some patterns of business innovation as being more sustainable than others. Sustainable patterns more often produce sustainable outcomes, hence their importance. Such patterns are predictable and recognizable, and tend to mirror a natural logic of problem or error detection, followed by trial-and-error for solutions. Most corporations block or interfere with these patterns, and we hope to correct that.
Truly adaptive organizations also require unimpeded access to information about how they're doing and whether or not their operations are sustainable. For this reason, we are also dedicated to innovating for sustainability ourselves, and are working on several related initiatives. Our focus on that front is on enhancing the Corporate Sustainability Management and Reporting function itself. See the Our Work page on this website for more information about that.
About CSI
The Center for Sustainable Innovation (CSI) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation created in 2004 by its founder, Mark W. McElroy. Its purpose is to conduct research, development, training, and consulting for, and with, companies around the world interested in managing and improving the sustainability of their operations.
What differentiates CSI from other advocates of organizational sustainability is its adherence to an approach for corporate sustainability management, measurement, and reporting that is context-based (i.e., an approach that measures organizational sustainability performance against actual social and environmental conditions in the world).
Thus, we argue for measuring and reporting fresh water use by a company, for example, against knowledge of what such levels ought to be, based on actual supplies in the world and principles of equity for how they should be shared. This we do as opposed to simply measuring and reporting consumption in a context-free or trend-lining fashion, as if background conditions didn’t matter. Moreover, we take the same approach on the social sustainability side of things, using a tool we developed called the Social Footprint Method. There again, we look at a company’s actual versus normative impacts, and measure its sustainability performance, accordingly.
CSI’s Executive Director, Mark W. McElroy, is board chair emeritus of the Sustainability Institute, formed in 1996 by the late Donella Meadows. He is a 30-year veteran of management consulting, having spent much of that time as a partner at KPMG, a senior manager at Price Waterhouse, and Co-Director of the Center for the Open Enterprise.
Mark is also a Visiting Researcher at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands, a post he holds in connection with CSI's recent work on the development of the Social Footprint Method (SFM). It is on the basis of that work that Mr. McElroy is a Ph.D. candidate at Groningen, having led the development of the SFM there.
