Sustainability as Value Creation:

ByMatt Walsh

Sustainability as Value Creation: With sustainability reporting on the near horizon for many organisations, sustainability as strategic differentiator can move beyond traditional CSR box-ticking to core value creation. Harvard Business Review identifies four key principles for strategic impact initiatives:

  • Listen before leaping
  • Deploy core strengths
  • Make impact drive value
  • Design for the long-run

Companies like Patagonia’s Worn Wear program demonstrate how circular economy principles create revenue streams while strengthening customer loyalty, proving that sustainable practices can simultaneously reduce costs and differentiate market positioning. Read the full HBR article for implementation guidance.

How could your organisation’s sustainability efforts be strategically aligned to become a source of competitive advantage rather than just compliance cost?


Creating Ecosystem Lock-in by Giving Away Knowhow: Lost in the headiness of NVIDIA’s valuation and tech darling status, you may not have clocked some of the cool stuff they are doing to build the railroads of the AI era. NVIDIA’s strategic shift to democratise AI through what they call NIMs (NVIDIA Inference Microservices) demonstrates the counterintuitive principle that while using physical assets depreciates their value, using and often giving away knowledge assets increases their value. CEO Jensen Huang unveiled NIMs as “AI microservices all packaged up “ that enable developers to “literally take these models, integrate them into your software packages, create AI agents” across industries from healthcare to finance to manufacturing. By making AI deployment as simple as developers downloading a container that is specifically built for your industry vertical, NVIDIA creates strategic dependence on their GPU/NPU infrastructure while ostensibly sharing technology freely, showing how sharing specifically targeted knowledge assets can create phenomenal value-creating ecosystems. Check out Huang’s keynote at CES 2025 for the full vision.

What knowledge assets could you systematically share to build ecosystem demand and dependence rather than hoarding that knowhow for competitive reasons?


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