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 and current Board Chair, Mark W. McElroy, Ph.D. Its purpose is to conduct research, development, training and consulting for, and with, companies around the world interested in improving the sustainability performance 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, economic and environmental conditions in the world). Water consumption, for example, is measured against renewable supplies; solid wastes are measured against landfill capacities; and impacts on social and economic conditions are measured against societal needs.
CSI’s founder and Board Chair, Mark W. McElroy, Ph.D., also serves on the board of the Sustainability Institute in Hartland, VT, and is Director of Research at the Center for Sustainability Performance at Deloitte Consulting in Waltham, MA. Mark is also affiliated with the University of Groningen in The Netherlands, where he completed his doctoral dissertation while creating the Social Footprint Method.
