CAMBRIDGE, MA — [Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on SocialFunds.com and is reprinted with permission.]

Launched in 2008, the Sustainability Initiative is a collaboration of the MIT Sloan Management Review and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The Initiative, which studies the impact of sustainability on business management, recently completed the first of what is projected to be an annual series of reports on sustainable business, based on its survey of business leaders.

The report, entitled The Business of Sustainability, found that while a vast majority of respondents described their companies as addressing sustainability in some way, relatively few had as yet developed a business case for sustainability. Especially among respondents with less expertise on the subject, sustainability was most often viewed as an obligatory response to legislative or regulatory pressure. However, the report found, the few companies that are aggressively pursuing sustainability are finding significant opportunities for profitability and competitive advantage.

SocialFunds.com spoke with Maurice Berns, a partner and managing director at BCG, and an author of the report, about the Sustainability Initiative and the findings of its survey.

"We launched the initiative because we found there was a lot of activity in the sustainability space, but there seemed to be a lack of a business perspective on it," Berns said.

The findings of the survey suggest that a clear definition of sustainability is itself a work in progress, which evolves as experience with sustainability grows. Novices tended to define the concept in terms of environmental or regulatory factors, and the benefits of sustainability as primarily related to such factors as brand enhancement. According to the report, a significant number of novices defined sustainability as "maintaining business viability."

Those with greater expertise, on the other hand, viewed sustainability more expansively, and as an integral part of value creation. Most self-defined experts on sustainability also underscored the importance of extending sustainability criteria to supply chains.

Asked for a working definition of sustainability that the Initiative itself would employ, Berns said, "The definition of sustainability that we chose to adopt was the Brundtland definition. It's broad enough to include a lot of stakeholders."

Published in 1987, the Brundtland Report, also known as Our Common Future, defined sustainable development as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."