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In the final report of our 8-year study of how corporations address sustainability, MIT Sloan Management Review and The Boston Consulting Group examine the crossroads at which sustainability now finds itself. Despite sociopolitical upheaval that threatens to reverse key gains, our research has shown that companies can develop workable — and profitable — sustainability strategies to reduce their impact on the global environment by incorporating 8 key lessons.

New strategies are helping companies embrace "collaborative consumption" and the “sharing economy.”

Companies can adopt one of five legal strategies: avoidance, compliance, prevention, value or transformation.

How can companies protect themselves when industries converge?

David Bresch, Head of Sustainability at Swiss Re, discusses the reinsurer's approach to climate change.

This is the third year that MIT Sloan Management Review has teamed up with the Boston Consulting Group on their Sustainability and Innovation Global Executive survey, to which more than 4,700 executives, managers and thought leaders from around the world responded. Results from this year's survey--conducted during June and July of 2011--indicate a growing interest in sustainability on the part of businesses. More respondents this year than last believe that sustainability- related strategies are necessary to be competitive. Respondents said their organizations are committing more money and attention to sustainability--and anticipate a continuing commitment in the coming year. The authors suggest that these findings indicate that sustainability is becoming an element on the agenda of top management. However, in the short run, sustainability is often eclipsed by other pressing business issues: Most survey respondents do not consider sustainability-related topics to be one of the top three business challenges their company faces in the next two years. The charts in this preview article represent the answers to just seven of the survey's 27 questions. The full report will be published this winter.

"We're taking analytics from a planning perspective to a planning, execution and evolution perspective," says David Kreutter, at Pfizer Inc. As a result, analytics has become "much more operational than it's been in the past." The ways that Pfizer Inc., [link: http://www.pfizer.com/home/ ] the global pharmaceutical company, uses analytics is changing, in no small thanks to the pressure on physicians to prescribe generic rather than brandname drugs. David Kreutter, is accountable for Pfizer's U.S. commercial operations and analytics. He says that "in terms of customer analytics and commercial operating analytics, Pfizer U.S. has a strong legacy of management science in operations research support." With a team of 40-50 economists, statisticians, operations research colleagues and scientists, Kreutter says the group historically has focused on promotional tactics: understanding the effectiveness of strategies used in the field, in conversations with physicians and other players who influence whether a Pfizer drug is prescribed or not. Today, that's a little different. Today, Kreutter says his team closely track how sales representatives present material and how presentations are received. It's information, he says, that's critical. Kreutter spoke with David Kiron, executive editor at MIT Sloan Management Review, and Rebecca Shockley, the business analytics and optimization global lead for the IBM Institute for Business Value, about how the company is generating daily data reports, why precision is overvalued and what the coming generic version of the company's popular Lipitor drug has meant in terms of attention to analytics.

In an interview that is part of SMR’s ongoing series on the business of sustainability, MIT’s Ernest Moniz, the director of the MIT Energy Initiative, explains why blending big-company culture with entrepreneurial innovation is the challenge that leaders must learn to meet. According to Moniz, large energy companies are the ones that have the capacity in terms of resources to scale up new technologies to impact climate change in a relatively short period of time. But to do so they need to be both “big and nimble.” “The number one overarching issue, which does pose business opportunity, business risk, and a need to rethink business models, is carbon constraints,” says Moniz. “As you know, 85 percent of our energy is fossil fuel. Fossil fuel equals carbon. Controlling carbon goes to the very core of the way we currently supply energy.” There are multiple strategies for dealing with innovation in a carbon-constrained world, including mergers and acquisitions, and investments in research. But the innovation culture is not natural to energy companies; until now they have been rewarded for reliability, not innovation. Cultivating an open mind, dealing with uncertainty, and balancing competing requirements necessary for innovation ultimately comes down to the judgment of senior executives.

How have strategies for supply chain design changed? Two leading thinkers offer insights.

Clayton Christensen is best known for his ideas about how disruptive innovations can transform markets. In this wide-ranging interview, he discusses topics ranging from the downturn's effect on innovation to opportunities to improve the U.S. health care system. Christensen thinks the economic downturn will be good for innovation, because downturns force innovators to adapt their strategies to the market quickly and inexpensively. What's more, he notes that resource constraints stimulate breakthrough thinking. And, despite the recent problems in the financial markets, Christensen believes that, overall, innovation has been beneficial in financial services. He cites historical financial innovations, such as no-load mutual funds and index funds, as examples of the way disruptive innovations in financial services have benefited consumers. However, he also notes that there are markets in which regulation is necessary--and the securities industry is one. Christensen, who is the coauthor of a new book on health care, The Innovator's Prescription, also discussed how disruptive innovation might improve the U.S. health care system. He explains how disruptive innovation helps make goods and services inexpensive and accessible.