Getting sustainable values into a sustainable business

Workshop | ESRC Festival of Social Science

Thursday, 8 Nov 2018

Running your own business is hard, but it can be especially difficult for people who want to set up a ‘green’ sustainable company. How do small businesses, micro businesses and self-employed people combine their sustainability goals with their commercial objectives?

This workshop, aimed at people managing small green businesses, will help you explore how to scale up your environmental and social impact, whilst running your business and maintaining your profits.

We have been conducting research with small businesses to explore the various ways they manage to combine their sustainability and commercial objectives. At this event we will introduce you to the key findings from this research, before breaking the audience up into smaller facilitated groups. In these groups we will discuss how the issue of sustainability affects your work, what (if any) tensions you face when trying to unite your sustainability and commercial goals, and finally how these tensions could be overcome.

There will also be presentations from Professor Fergus Lyon, Dr Richard Blundel and other keynote speakers from the world of business. The small groups will be facilitated by the speakers and others with experience of this work.

In partnership with the Impact Hub Islington, this event will build on a collaboration between the ESRC Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, and the ESRC Impact Acceleration Award funding for Growing Greener: Creating a New Values-based Environmental Engagement Toolkit for SME Intermediaries (2018-19).