Dennis Pamlin is a senior associate at the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences. As a strategic economic, technology and innovation advisor, Dennis works with companies and government on sustainability initiatives such as IKEA goes renewable. He also initiated World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Trade and Investment Program work in the BRIC countries. “It is time to move beyond incremental improvements and tap into the potential that the new generation of technologies provides," says Dennis about his work.
What are good examples of sustainable business initiatives?
“My heart goes out to organizations that are making changes that will allow them to keep making profits, whilst reducing the overall resource consumption. BYD for instance, that built the world's first mass-produced, plug-in hybrid car. In Baoding, a relatively small city in China, 150 new alternative energy companies have emerged, making use of wind and solar power, bio-diesel, and energy efficiencies. Telecom operators and major ICT companies such as Cisco, Ericsson, HP, IBM and SAS also offer interesting solutions to deliver real sustainability."
How has sustainable entrepreneurship taken shape within your organization?
“We’re the first generation of global citizens. The global economy and challenges require that we think as such. Also, the new network economy is not about competition, but about collaboration. My mission is to make sure that making and saving money go together. I help companies and governments see the same map of the same economy and to move from concept to reality and find new markets and customers."
Who in the organization should be responsible for building sustainability strategies?
“The CEO and board must be fully committed. Also, it must be clear that everyone in the organization is involved. Sustainability will never happen if only Environmental Health & Safety and Corporate Social Responsibility departments are held responsible."
What are reasonable sustainability objectives for most businesses?
“Enterprises need to shift from a product to a services perspective, applying life cycle approaches that support cradle-to-cradle strategies along all value chains and using ecosystem services sustainably. Also, they need to make sure that they offer something that 9 billion people can use. In the end, it’s all about developing new things and increasing sales."
How sustainable are you?
“Material things don’t matter much to me. My pleasures are meeting friends, reading books, listening to classical music and visiting the theatre. I am a vegetarian. To me, sustainability isn’t a matter of being perfect or feeling guilty, but a journey wherein transparency can help us. Transparency is like a Dracula strategy. You need to drag beautiful things into the light in order to save them. That’s why we have to differentiate emissions. My own big bad emissions such as air mileage must be an investment in a more transparent society through clean technologies such as videoconferencing."
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