Sustainability in Life Sciences.

Porche Consulting held a digital roundtable on Why Sustainability Matters for Life Sciences.

First thing that caught my eye was the balanced panel, equal gender representation, different countries and ethnicities. That was a total buy-in for me. So I enrolled. The diversity in the panel immediately presented itself in a diversity of point of views and opinions. This is exactly the reason why I am such a passionate advocate of diverse panels and management. It's not about being a feminist or politically correct, it is about the diversity in views that make things interesting.

And to recap the panel -

The challenges are in decision criteria and building a new culture to make a paradigm shift because this is a long term one issue. Collaboration is critical because all have the same challenges and joining forces can result in greater impact.

Sustainability is one of the five major trends in the life science industry today, together with digitization and product development. Being sustainable is not a threat, however, not being sustainable is not an option if you want to be successful. It goes to employer branding, Foster innovation, risk mitigation, competitive edge now and higher revenue in the long term. It may cost your business. So basically, it is a Win-Win situation. Other considerations are:

• Regulation and requirements from the value chain can lead to market exclusion.

• Customers are willing to change behavior and invest in sustainable companies.

• Employees want to support this activity, and 31% will not apply to the same employer due to poor sustainability action plan. Also goes to future recruitment and expert retainment.

Life sciences can have a positive impact on sustainability through several channels:

• Leverage technological development to address the visible health challenges;

• Essentially, it is not so polluting, innovation can help be better;

• Development timelines are long, and sustainable goals can be implemented relatively easily;

• Innovate to tackle future problems. Innovation can reduce costs while reducing negative impact, ranging from water and packaging reduction to better production efficiency. All resulting in financial as well as impact advantages;

The challenges for implementing a sustainability policy

• Multinational organization should make the sustainable actions as part of the core. This can help mobilize the entire company.

• Understand and define baselines, growth projections and derive the areas of focus for tangible progress and impact.

• The conversation always narrows down to the environment, although it encompasses so much more.

• Get acquainted with the language. EU action plan 2018 has problematic taxonomy for sustainable activities. Mutual taxonomy is important for standardization of reporting, then efforts can be channeled to actual work. Digitization of the data collection and reporting is very challenging.

• Value chain is influenced by investors, and each company has to focus on the things that are important to its stakeholders. Companies need to make it work internally so it can make an external difference. The strategy, long term goals and priorities should be there. Just be ahead of the game. Being behind regulation gives you time to prepare, so that's another advantage.

How to move forward?

• Engage all stakeholders, make sure that top management is truly and engaged and communicate to all employees.

• People inside the company are encouraged to innovate with their own value set. Just harness this power.

• Transparency inside the company as well as outside is crucial. Having a strategy and goals can help you find the opportunities. It also provides the company with focus and prioritization. Integrate the sustainability policy into the organizational values.

• Stick to a single reporting method for clarity.

• External cooperation – The industry is very inter-connected. Leveraging this will make the industry stronger by sharing information on the environmental side as well as the procurement side. Keeping the same language will help here as well.

On a final note - Most important goal is now access to medicine. Entering developing countries is a difficult task riddled with many regulatory barriers. We need to look into the future and realize there is a new pandemic coming, and this time we can be more prepared.

#TSBC #ImpactInvesting #sustainability