Having just returned to our offices after a great week at the BSR Conference 2009 in San Francisco, I am both sobered by the daunting challenges we face as a global community and inspired by the unprecedented opportunities we have to meet -- and beat -- them. With our powerful network of organizations and individuals committed to making a difference, I believe we can do this.

As BSR President and CEO Aron Cramer noted in his opening remarks, the mere fact that 1,000 of you, from nearly 40 countries, came to learn, discuss, and debate the best path forward shows that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is alive and well in the midst of the worst recession we have seen in decades.

Whereas a year ago at the BSR Conference, we focused on whether and how CSR would retain its relevance in a challenging economic environment, the dominant themes of our time together last week revolved around how we could best deploy our resources and creativity to capture the vast opportunities presented by this new “reset world.” This shift from a focus on challenges and risks to a focus on innovation and opportunity was the big story of this year’s Conference.

During his address, Cramer also laid out BSR’s road map for achieving success in this new world:

1. Promote innovation for sustainability.
2. Embrace systems redesign.
3. Maximize the power of networks.

This framework nicely summarizes the outputs of the diverse plenary sessions, breakouts, workshops, and hallway conversations that unfolded over the next three days of the BSR Conference in San Francisco.

Promote Innovation for Sustainability

Whether in the service of more sustainable products and services, business models, or entire industries, innovation was a major theme in most of our plenary and working sessions. So what are the key attributes of this innovation for sustainability?

• According to Alcatel-Lucent CEO Ben Verwaayen: “Innovation is not just technology. It is doing things better, and doing things on a bigger scale.”
• Erik Joule of Levi Strauss & Co. (pdf) emphasized that innovation is just as often about making small changes and focusing on small wins as it is a single grand redesign.
• In his session on ecoliteracy and ecodesign (pdf), Fritjof Capra called on us to evolve from a focus on objects to a focus on relationships. Using the example of cars, he pointed out that the value is not in the car as a product, but in the car as a mobility service.
• BROAD Air Conditioning CEO Zhang Yue echoed this theme when he characterized his company’s mission not as selling air-conditioners but as “allowing our customers to be more energy efficient.”
• In the plenary panel on integrating sustainability into innovation, Nike Sustainable Business and Innovation Vice President Hannah Jones emphasized that sustainability-based innovation needs to be “out there, open-sourced, and shared.” In that same session, John Kao pointed out that no one player or sector possesses all the answers. He called for a new form of collaboration among public and private organizations, NGOs, and civil society.
• Public-private partnerships were also the subjects of Elizabeth Frawley Bagley’s plenary address as well as our two-hour working session on government partnerships (pdf), where Howcast Media Cofounder Sanjay Raman noted, “Once you start working with someone in government, it connects you to a lot more people, and that opens lots of doors.”