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The case describes IKEA’s new approach to making an impact through IKEA Belgium’s “Welcome Home Project,” dedicated to assisting single-parent families. The idea for the program came about during a cross-functional brainstorming session and initially involved donating funds and furniture to centers and shelters supporting such families. The project evolved to engage IKEA co-workers who volunteered their expertise during working hours to help set up housing and shelters. Another dimension was added as the initiative gained momentum and IKEA began collaborating with numerous social welfare organizations, collectively working towards policy changes intended to create a fairer and more supportive environment for single-parent families. While the program achieved remarkable results, the journey was not without its share of challenges. Transitioning from traditional donations to more innovative collaborative approaches required courage, and the team encountered resistance and skepticism along the way. Some of the social welfare organizations questioned the authenticity of IKEA’s motives, sometimes assuming economic self-interest instead of altruism. Collaboration with organizations that were so fundamentally different from IKEA required perseverance. Despite the enthusiasm of the IKEA co-workers who volunteered to support the social welfare organizations, internal communication efforts to raise awareness about the program proved to be an ongoing challenge. Recognizing the potential for international inspiration, IKEA considered sharing insights within its network. Simultaneously, the local team contemplated the next steps for IKEA Belgium, aware of the potential for further impact.

MADRID (SPAIN), MARCH 2023. Jaime Garcia-Prieto, founder and CEO of Galeneo, was polishing the deck for the fundraising for his healthcare start-up. The seed round of €1 million would take him to the institutional A round scheduled for Q3-2024, a comfortable 18-month+ runway. His proposal to decentralize healthcare through a tech-enabled hospital@home platform offered the solution people were looking for not only in Spain but also in most advanced economies. According to a recent Economist article, the NHS, like many healthcare systems, had become a sickness service, not a health service. To live up to the promise of its name would require a shift in focus, away from hospitals to the community, from centralized treatment to community-based prevention and bedside medicine. In other words, health systems needed to be investing in smoke alarms, not fire extinguishers. In 2020, as the Covid pandemic began, Jaime envisioned the future of in-home care for patients with chronic treatment needs. In 2021, he embarked on developing a platform to coordinate bedside medical care anywhere, anytime, in minutes. Galeneo was born. By 2023, it had integrated 200+ healthcare providers (HCPs) and 11+ institutional partners in the Madrid region, enabling the provision of general high-value services outside hospital. Revenues of €1.6 million in 2023 were expected, with a growth rate of about 8% every month and net profit breakeven reached in February. Things looked positive, but there were issues around scaling fast – although Jaime had found solutions. To counter the limited availability of qualified healthcare workers, he developed the Galeneo Academy to train future in-home bedside specialists. Tech-enabled standardization reduced operational complexity through an easy-to-use app and included real-time monitoring and quality control. Finally, the whole concept of community-based bedside medicine was still nascent, which meant market participants needed to adopt original approaches. But it was a large market with great potential.

Aiming to blaze the trail that would lead the air travel industry out of the pandemic, SITA decided to reshuffle and renew its credit facilities. In the process, it established that sustainability – particularly ESG factors – would play an increasingly critical role in the financing of the struggling aviation sector. Negotiating a sustainability-linked revolving credit facility (RCF) that connected specific ESG targets to potential pricing benefits proved to be an opportunity for SITA’s executives to (1) draw on and gauge the impact of SITA’s established credentials and experience in areas that included carbon-neutral certification and accessing alternative sources of funding such as Schuldschein; (2) alleviate financial risk for airlines (as SITA members); and (3) kickstart a broader, organization-wide change process led by Finance and Treasury, of ESG learning, data collection (encompassing scope 2 and 3) and building a culture of sustainability. Although the purely economic gains of ESG compliance for SITA might be modest overall, several positive links emerged. They include those between meeting ESG targets and obtaining priority access to funding, better compliance with regulatory requirements, increased customer loyalty and employee productivity, and improved firm value and financial performance.

By 2023, the global online resale marketplace Vestiaire Collective – founded in 2009 – had attracted more than 23 million members across 50 countries. Investors included global luxury group Kering. According to Vestiaire Collective’s executives, the secondhand apparel market was valued at between US$100 billion and US$120 billion. The company described itself as having a “a circular business model” and being “one piece of the puzzle in circularity.” Vestiaire’s leaders estimated that buying a used garment extended its life by 2.2 years, on average, reducing its environmental footprint by 90%. In addition, 82% of items bought on Vestiaire were believed to have replaced a first-hand purchase. Furthermore, Vestiaire was the first fashion resale platform to ban ultra-fast fashion. The company was also one of the first marketplaces to insert itself as a trustworthy middleman by authenticating the items for sale. Nevertheless, the fashion resale market was seeing significant consolidation, suggesting that only the biggest and fittest would survive. As of April 2023, Vestiaire Collective was still not profitable. Selling pre-worn clothes online remained a challenging process where every item must be sorted, priced, photographed and described in a listing. Against this backdrop, what were Vestiaire Collective’s best bets to achieve profitability? Importantly, should luxury brands venture into this territory – and if so, how?

Although Patagonia is not a player in the luxury segment per se, its track record in achieving circularity speaks volumes to luxury brands in terms of what a more mass-market brand is prepared to achieve in the circularity space and on its implications. Patagonia has discouraged overproduction and overconsumption, consistently working to create products that would never end up in a landfill. The main tenets of the company’s approach were called the five Rs. Reduce: Don’t buy what you don’t need. Repair: Fix items that still have life in them. Reuse: Sell or pass clothing on. When you’ve exhausted those options: Recycle. The last tenet, Reimagine, was a pledge to “take only what nature can replace.” Early on, Patagonia executives began investigating how they could encourage customers to reuse older clothing items that were not worn or no longer fit. Nevertheless, studies on textile circularity in general have pointed out that the practice has yet to establish sustainable economies. Large-scale reuse, repair and recycling have typically been hindered by high transportation, labor and processing costs as well as the decreasing quality and cost of new products. Furthermore, notwithstanding its status as the clothing industry’s beacon of sustainability – and billing itself as “in business to save our home planet” – Patagonia has never shied away from pursuing a high-growth, for-profit business model.

Jewelry manufacturer and retailer Pandora is one of the largest jewelry players in the world. One of the key programs in Pandora’s circularity efforts had to do with the target of sourcing 100% recycled silver and gold by 2025. Executing on this goal became a complex journey, particularly as recycling precious metals represented a supply chain in its own right. It also came with its own set of carbon impacts and environmental protection requirements. Could Pandora overcome the many constraints in operationalizing a viable circular model for silver and gold?

In March 2022 Sony and Honda signed a memorandum of understanding to establish a joint venture to develop an electric vehicle that would combine Honda’s car-building expertise with Sony’s skillset in imaging, sensors, communication, networking and entertainment technologies for the vehicle’s travel and service platform. Despite being a leading player in the automotive industry for decades, Honda had recently fallen behind its competitors in one crucial area – the development of EVs. Sony, while successful in image sensor and content IP, had also entered the EV market. Given the competitive landscape of EVs, it was not surprising, in view of the two giants’ complimentary expertise, that they decided to cooperate and establish Sony Honda Mobility. The newly formed joint venture had a bold purpose: “Move people, through the pursuit of innovation with diverse inspirations.” In January 2023 Sony Honda Mobility unveiled the world premiere of its prototype electric car − the Afeela – in Las Vegas at the Consumer Technology Association’s annual trade event, CES. With plans to hit the North American market in 2026, the Afeela was set to revolutionize the way people perceive electric mobility.

The collaboration between ZENITH and Nona Source – the LVMH group’s resale platform for deadstock – resulted in a 2021 product launch that saw ZENITH unveil a series of changeable textile straps as part of its women’s watch collection named DEFY Midnight. It reflected a choice the ZENITH brand made to step outside its traditional territory and endorse eco-conception and innovative collaborations. The challenge for the company was to ensure that the experimentation would not compromise in any way the underlying perception of luxury.

Part B of the Rio Tinto: Everyday Respect multimedia case series reveals the reaction to the report of various stakeholders, as well as how Rio Tinto has acted on the report’s recommendations. The case also shares some of the creative ways Rio Tinto has instilled a culture of respect and enabled it to permeate throughout the organization.

In February 2022 Rio Tinto publicly released a workplace culture report that revealed that sexual harassment, racism and bullying had been occurring at an alarming rate throughout the organization. This was shortly after the Juukan Gorge disaster in Australia: Rio Tinto caused global outrage when its technicians blew up two rock shelters considered sacred by the Aboriginal traditional owners and deemed to be of “the highest archaeological significance in Australia” by scientists. Why did Rio Tinto commission the report, how did it deal with the findings, and how might reckoning with the past shape its future? In Part A of this online multimedia case series, three Rio Tinto executives – James Martin, Chief People Officer, Kellie Parker, Chief Executive, Australia and Isabelle Deschamps, Chief Legal Officer, Governance & Corporate Affairs – and the independent expert commissioned to write the report, Liz Broderick, describe in their own words their experiences, considerations and the debate about whether to release the report.