Sustainability, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

This book offers students and instructors the opportunity to analyze businesses whose products and
strategies are designed to offer innovative solutions to some of the twenty-first century’s most difficult
societal challenges. A new generation of profitable businesses is actively engaged in cleantech, renewable
energy, and financially successful product system design and supply chain strategies that attempt to meet
our economic development aspirations while addressing our social and ecological challenges. This textbook
offers background educational materials for instructors and students, business cases illustrating
sustainability innovation, and teaching notes that enable instructors to work effectively and accelerate
student learning.
The industrial revolution marked an era of tremendous growth, innovation, and prosperity in many parts of
the world—but those achievements also have had unintended consequences that are increasingly obvious.
Climate change, pollution, water scarcity, toxins in products and food, and loss of ecosystem services and
biological diversity, among other problems, pose serious threats that may undermine the remarkable
human progress achieved. Major forces behind these challenges are the unprecedented global population
explosion and advances in technology that have caused dramatic increases in industrial production, energy
use, and material throughput. As a consequence, technology races to keep pace with the demand for land,
water, materials, energy, and food. At the same time, technology is being applied to address the growing
volume of waste that disrupts and impairs natural systems worldwide, including our bodies and physical
health. These burdens fall most heavily on those least able to avoid the adverse impacts, fight for resources,
or protest: children and the poor.
We know that those same natural systems being undermined by industrialization provide the critical
ecological services on which we depend for life, health, and the pursuit of prosperity. Furthermore, it is
implicitly assumed our health must be sacrificed in the name of economic growth, as evident in growing
environmental health problems and chronic health threats such as asthma, diabetes, and cancer that
accompany expanded economic activity worldwide

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