
Economy
Regenerative Businesses in 2024
By TBY | Sep 27, 2024
Image credit: Shutterstock / SeventyFour
No CEO can declare with a straight face that the bottom line is no longer a primary consideration.
Business, after all, is business, and a company’s strategies must stand the test of time.
Yet today, we are witnessing the rise and rise of mission-driven brands from firms that have adopted a regenerative ethic.
One dedicated to reducing the harm resulting from commerce and industry, and to a more equitable distribution of the spoils of commercial success more widely than conventional business imperatives would allow.
So, What is a Regenerative Model?
Essentially, it is a plan for ensuring sustainable commercial and industrial practices that go the extra mile in terms of circularity, waste mitigation in resource consumption, as well as social responsibility and inclusivity.
These goals are best achieved, of course, through ensuring that all agents involved are, and remain, on the same page. Therefore, regenerative business models depend upon actionable shared goals across new and pre-existing value chains.
Adopters of this approach, while active in one specific industry, then champion a raft of common attitudes across all stakeholders, with each apportioned a responsibility or part of the overall puzzle—much in the same way that a doctor, regardless of their particular specialization, promotes overall bodily health in a patient.
In fact, the results of a 2023 poll of 800 executives conducted by American global management consulting, Kearney, confirmed that for a business to be regenerative, it must look beyond its supply chain.
Duly, while 58% of C-suite respondents noted the need for action-orientated leadership, 60% affirmed the value of adopting a regenerative culture. A culture that also encompasses the end-consumer.
Brand New Thinking
Many businesses have adopted employee-ownership and profit-sharing models to extend commercial success with a wider community through a measurable sharing of responsibility and returns.
Meanwhile, in such models, profit turned is often directed at a charity directly related to, or tangential to the firm’s business.
A prime example from the UK is the craft beer brand Toast Ale. The company arose from two entrepreneurs disturbed by the waste of food resulting from the edges of bread cut-off ready-packed sandwiches. The solution? Waste bread was purchased for fermentation, giving rise to a successful brand, the profits of which go to a food waste charity – circularity at work.
Not Just Mitigation
The systems-based mindset underpinning regenerative models looks to do more than reduce harm arising from economic processes.
Rather, the goal is to restore, if not actually safeguard, the planet’s natural resources for tomorrow, as well as maximize the longevity and conditions of social and economic capital.
With the world’s next great battleground set to be water—and, by extension, food—if climate change is neglected, the supply chains of key industries, such as agriculture, forestry, mining, manufacturing, energy, and construction, must commit to harmonized practices.
Wheel of Fortune
One model of particular merit is the Regenerative Mindset Wheel implemented by the ThinkPlace Institute for Regenerative Design.
The latter is a mindset and culture-building entity reaching ‘businesses, scientists, policymakers, economists, financiers, investors, innovators and consumers’ in nine countries.
It is dedicated to, ‘…creating regenerative futures, going beyond the sustainable intent. That is, advancing, ‘…beyond a doing “no harm” mindset to one in which we build the capacity of our social, environmental, and economic systems to heal and thrive [essential] if we are to live within our planetary boundaries by 2050.’
In short, net zero is the overarching ambition.
Ultimately, the goal of the regenerative model is to reconfigure the commercial mindset. Without neglecting commercial viability and performance, the emphasis centers on environmental soundness and social welfare in place of today’s legacy of Fordism, which is an industrial orientation towards efficiency and optimization.
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