Pamela Hartigan , Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Saïd Business School and Founding Partner of Volans, called for a radical re-think of business models during the Enterprise Tuesday talk on 26th October.

She encouraged businesses to consider a wider group of stakeholders, including the communities and environmental eco-systems in which the company is operating, arguing that the need to deliver profit in the short term has exhorted an environmental and social price. While corporate responsibility has been high on the agenda for many companies, Pamela was keen to inspire new and established businesses to factor in the social, environmental impact as well as financial outcomes.

Leading on from this discussion, Professor Howard Chase, Head of the School of Technology at the University of Cambridge, provided a pertinent example of the challenges of meeting customer and stakeholder needs with the green tech start-up Enval. Professor Chase is R&D Director at Enval which has developed technology to recover aluminium materials from packaging.

The process benefits rubbish processing facilities and local authorities by removing the need to pay for waste going to landfill. Plus, there is an environmental need to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill sites.

The purchasing power of end users means manufacturers of this type of packaging need to look at alternatives and overcome the negative perceptions associated with a non-recyclable product. Enval is therefore considering a range of approaches and business opportunities with a large number of stakeholders now interested in a process that makes products recyclable and eliminates the need to develop new packaging.

Enterprise Tuesday is a series of lectures and networking sessions on entrepreneurial themes, managed and delivered by Cambridge Judge Business School’s Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (CfEL), which runs from October to February each year. It is currently free to attend and open to the wider community.

The next session takes place tomorrow (November 2) with Lord Karan Bilimoria, founder of Cobra Beer, talking about opportunity recognition and the challenges of managing rapid growth. If you’re interested in attending, please register online via the CfEL website at http://www.cfel.jbs.cam.ac.uk/programmes/enterprisetuesday/register.html
 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.