Holistic Reinvention: The Design and Implementation of a Global Product Sustainability Scorecard

In October 2013 L’Oreal announced one of the most ambitious corporate sustainability strategies in the world – a set of commitments aimed at transforming the ways in which the company innovates, manufactures its products, communicates with consumers and shares its growth with communities along the entire value chain. Taken in aggregate, the new commitments amounted to a new management norm making environmental and social factors just as important in evaluating future products as the products’ financial contribution.

The quality of innovation that has followed from this ambitious strategy is nothing short of remarkable. This talk will share the story of one of the main tools used to navigate the journey – a global social and environmental product assessment methodology used to redesign product and packaging development processes. This new way of approaching product innovation has been embedded into existing product design processes and deployed worldwide, and we can all learn from the resulting benefits and challenges.