Sustainable Business Initiative

Our purpose

Building on decades of sustainability research at INSEAD, the Sustainable Business Initiative brings together faculty from across the school to examine how business can address today's environmental and social challenges. Through cross-disciplinary collaboration, it produces rigorous insights that help leaders respond to these issues.

Sustainability remains a defining concern for businesses. Yet although it is widely recognised as a business imperative, most corporations still regard it as peripheral to their core activities rather than integral to them. The challenge is not only to show the business opportunity in making sustainability part of core functions, but also to equip leaders to build new business models, with the frameworks, strategies and analytical tools to do so.

This knowledge must come from academia. Academic research is independent, objective and grounded in rigorous methods, and its purpose is to create new knowledge...

Atalay Atasu

Academic Director, INSEAD Sustainable Business Initiative
Professor of Technology and Operations Management
The Bianca and James Pitt Chair in Environmental Sustainability

Atalay Atasu

Academic Director, INSEAD Sustainable Business Initiative
Professor of Technology and Operations Management
The Bianca and James Pitt Chair in Environmental Sustainability

In the Spotlight

Activities

Our main activity is building content based on solid research. Our aim is to make INSEAD a reference in business sustainability research. As such, the Initiative

fosters critical, independent research on integrating sustainability in businesses and policy making.
invites and enables research in sustainability from all faculty.
enables further industry interaction to keep a pulse on emerging issues.
disseminates research extensively to share insights beyond the academic context.

Research topics

The Initiative advances collaborative and inclusive research. Some examples are:

Environmentally Focused Research Topics

Circular Economy: How do we create industrial systems that maximize resource efficiency and minimize pollution?
Sustainable Innovation: How do we design products and processes that help protect the environment? How can we redesign the industrial ecosystems and cities to create a better world?
Sustainable Investing: What is the link between an organization’s environmental impact performance and its valuation? Can stakeholder and shareholder views of capitalism be aligned?
Habits and Sustainability: How do the ways consumers form habits affect their environmentally responsible behavior?

Environmental and Social

Sustainable Agriculture: Can we design industrial and small-scale agricultural systems in a way that it helps improve the well-being of developing economies, improve the condition of natural ecosystems, and limit resource scarcity?
Responsible Analytics: Can we use the new analytical tools (e.g., machine learning and artificial intelligence) and our access to big data to help protect the environment and the underserved populations.
Sustainable Innovation: Can we rethink industrial design from scratch? Is there a way we can transform pollution into value?

Social

Not-for-profit Operations: How does an operations perspective help improve the effectiveness of not-for-profit organizations? How are these entities different from for-profit organizations from a system design perspective?
Humanitarian Operations: What are the best practices to serve the underprivileged in developing economies? How can academia and large humanitarian organizations (e.g., Red Cross, World Food Programme) collaborate on the ground?
Social Entrepreneurship and Impact: What is impact in a social context? How can entrepreneurs create businesses that not only help serve the underprivileged and also create value?
Measurement and Reporting in Sustainability: How do we quantify and assess sustainability performance?

Governance and Social

Ethical Artificial Intelligence: Do algorithms pay attention to treating customers/businesses/managers fairly? How do we measure and correct any algorithmic biases in artificial intelligence?
Governance and Fair Process: How do we create fair processes in the executive suite and the board room?

The Sustainable Business Initiative plays a central role in shaping sustainability education at INSEAD. By translating faculty research into case studies, frameworks and other pedagogical material, the Initiative contributes to the development of course content across the school's degree, executive education and online programmes.

Years of research, collaboration and teaching within the Initiative have culminated in two complementary outputs: a book and a GEMBA elective course, both titled The Ultimate Disruption.

The book, The Ultimate Disruption: Rethinking Business in a World Transformed by Climate Change by Professors Atalay Atasu and Luk Van Wassenhove, is forthcoming from Harvard Business Review Press in February 2027. It argues that sustainability must be treated as a core strategic imperative rather than a compliance exercise, and it sets out a framework for rethinking strategy, value propositions and business models so that environmental value is created alongside customer utility and profit. Its case studies are drawn from real business examples developed in collaboration with the Initiative, such as Polygreen's zero-waste transformation of a Greek island and Schneider Electric's global decarbonisation initiatives. These cases show how companies can turn environmental constraints into sources of innovation and growth.

The GEMBA elective, currently being piloted, examines how continuously shifting environmental and social trade-offs affect business continuity and competition. Rather than taking a moral position, the course adopts a pragmatic, decision-oriented approach: participants make and defend decisions in live cases, with feedback from an AI agent trained on INSEAD research. The aim is to help leaders interpret these trade-offs as signals of new dependencies, risks and opportunities, and to form and defend their own position on them.

The Initiative seeks to expand the community of scholars working at the intersection of business and sustainability, both within INSEAD and beyond. It encourages faculty from all academic areas to engage with sustainability questions in their research, creating opportunities for collaboration across disciplines that might otherwise remain separate.

Supporting the next generation of researchers is central to this goal. The Initiative aims to support doctoral students and early-career scholars in developing their research projects, giving them access to faculty expertise, data and industry partners.

Beyond INSEAD, the Initiative fosters exchange with the wider academic community through research collaborations, visiting scholars, and participation in conferences and workshops. Through its industrial research partners and collaborators, it also connects scholars with organisations facing sustainability challenges in practice, so that research remains grounded in real business problems and its findings reach those best placed to apply them.