Scaling Sustainability Innovation

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Stanford Ecopreneurship Programs, a partnership between Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Doerr School of Sustainability, hosted a conference on the subject of Scaling Sustainability Innovation.

This conference sought to bring together leading academic scholars, sustainability-focused entrepreneurs [aka ecopreneurs] and business leaders to share challenges and best practices in scaling sustainability innovation. This knowledge-sharing aimed to generate new holistic understanding about effective strategies and practice when scaling sustainability innovation in a variety of contexts, to accelerate a multi-trillion dollar transition to address current global climate and sustainability challenges and create a future where humans and nature thrived in concert and in perpetuity.

Key themes of discussion included:

• Various pathways to scale sustainability innovation, spanning startups, established for-profit corporations, nonprofits, governments, universities, etc.
• The role that people/leadership development had in scaling sustainability-focused innovations/organizations
• The role that various forms of capital played at different stages of scaling sustainability innovation
• The role that various forms of partnerships played at different stages of scaling sustainability
• How entrepreneurs and business owners navigated their relationship with government at different stages of scaling

The conference also included an Innovation Expo, aimed at showcasing sustainability innovation coming out of Stanford’s ecosystem and fostering fruitful connections between ecopreneurs, investors, and partners.

Attendees could explore key insights from last year in our whitepaper, Lessons in Scaling Sustainability Innovation.