Environmental concerns like climate change have not yet become the primary driver for businesses to define, implement, and execute a dedicated sustainability strategy. Rather, sustainability initiatives are driven today by cost and efficiency opportunities.

However, many companies are realizing that sustainability is increasingly important to advance their brand and competitive differentiation, respond to rising customer and regulatory pressures, attract new generations of talent, and enter or even create new markets. While the growth side of sustainability seems to be generally recognized, it is much more complex to measure and, hence, to manage, than the cost side.

Thus, we see widely varying approaches to corporate sustainability, and many companies are still reluctant to pursue sustainability at all.

A recent Accenture study of 766 CEOs, conducted in cooperation with the UN Global Compact, found that brand, trust, and reputation is the most frequently-cited driver for pursuing sustainability, followed by potential revenue growth/cost reduction, and personal motivation. Interestingly, CEOs rank pressures from governments/regulatory and investors/shareholders at the low end of their motivation scale (see Figure 1 below).

In our understanding the underlying challenge to incorporating sustainability is to shift from applying traditional -- industrial-inspired -- thinking and approaches, formed and nurtured by education and businesses for more than a century. Hence it is not surprising to see that 88 percent of the CEOs surveyed by Accenture and the UN Global Compact state that is important/very important that educational systems and business schools must develop mindsets and skills for future leaders to address sustainability.

Sustainability is about changing the perspective and approach to become a true lever for innovation over the next decade. We see "sustainabilization" arising as the fourth driver for economic innovation and growth, building upon the previous waves: industrialization (shift from agricultural to industrial economy), globalization (globally distributed value chains), and digitalization (shift from industrial to information economy through the advent of ICT).