Sustainable ventures leverage opportunities to improve human well-being while contributing to environmental sustainability in ways that are scalable and replicable. They are initiatives on the micro-level, operated by businesses, but also by non-profit or public actors. Because they manage to align environmental, social and economic goals, they can make an important contribution to some of the most pressing current global challenges: the alleviation of poverty, guided by the Millennium Development Goals, and the maintenance of global environmental goods such as a sound climate and rich biodiversity. This publication highlights many examples of such ventures.

 

Developing and managing sustainable ventures is a challenge. Business models for these ventures are often new or need to be developed. Hence, experience with regard to their feasibility and growth potential is often lacking. Moreover, managing an initiative with more than one goal increases complexity. Systematic analysis can help to identify, evaluate, manage and promote sustainable ventures. But unlike for mainstream business ventures, tools to support such systematic analysis are currently not available. This document introduces a toolbox to analyse sustainable ventures.

 

The toolbox addresses initiatives that support sustainable ventures: Donor programmes, award schemes, private and public investors, professional education programs, policy makers and others. These initiatives contribute to the success of sustainable ventures through funding, facilitation, capacity building, and the creation of an enabling environment. Through their activities, they can encourage and enable more systematic approaches, e.g. through providing incentives by requesting structured information for their application procedures. The tools can be used as a basis for business plan application frameworks or loan and grant proposal requirements. They can also help to inform, train and support ventures in using an analytical approach. Communication and teaching material as well as the structure of workshops or advice and consulting programmes can build on the tools. In order to be applicable to all these different users and uses, the tools are kept flexible and generic. Support initiatives can specify and simplify them according to their own needs.

 

The tools respond to three questions that appear over and again in the process of building and managing a sustainable venture: