These days, integrated reporting is a corporate dog everyone loves to kick.

People will tell you it’s a bore, a chore, a snore. It’s another corporate cost center, a straightjacket on corporate communication, a full-employment program dreamed up by do-gooders to give jobs to bean counters.

To its harshest critics,...

By Nancy Meyer

What can pharma learn from FarmVille?

That enormously popular online game played—and shared—by millions on social networks, illustrates principles of engagement, interactivity, motivation, and loyalty that can be harnessed by healthcare firms.

It’s called gamification, applying game thinking and game mechanics to non-game environments to engage audiences and solve problems. We believe healthcare can take the best lessons from games like FarmVille, World of...

By DAVE CHASE

Healthcare has been a technology paradox for a long time. There have been few places further out on the cutting edge of technology than biotech and medical devices. In contrast, healthIT has been in a time warp (see Why It’s Good News HealthIT is So Bad). While next year is the 20th anniversary of the Web, the dominant...

By Mark Hecker

I’m passionate about my work. It’s rare that this passion creates anger. But, most definitely, that happened last week when I read the EdWeek blog post of Tom Vander Ark, a Venture Capitalist working in the educational space.

Never before have I seen such a clear indication that the “Ed...

During a recent discussion with an executive for a major food producer who manages sustainability programs, we were surprised that the issue of labeling products containing GMOs was off her radar now that California’s Prop 37 was defeated. From a Future 500 perspective, fostering corporate-NGO engagement on contentious issues like GMO labeling...

Posted on SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS TOOLKIT

By Oluwabamise Lanre Afolabi

There are concerns that emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil will overtake developed countries in their future demand for energy. This is because the demand for energy in these countries is...

By DAVIS SWAN

In a previous blog I discussed three very different types of solar energy electricity generation;  Photo-voltaic (PV), Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) and Solar Updraft chimneys.  This blog will deal with a branch of CSP that hasn’t received much attention and hasn’t yet been commercially deployed on a large scale.  This could be referred to as non-thermal CSP.

...

The sharing economy is really an exciting new development that can and will continue to take on many new forms as innovation continues to broaden our horizons and break down the barriers that once stood in the way of the world becoming more like one big family.

Of course, some companies (like rental companies) have been in the sharing economy business for a long time (without being called that) and are now being updated with new models (and sometimes new players) that leverage the power of technology and social networking.

...

By Beth Bengtson

How will digital health communications change this year? Certainly there’s work to be done on this front. Here are the musings of the Hale Advisors team on where we need to evolve as communicators and the trends to watch.

Evolve:

• We need to become more than marketers – not only do marketers now have to become publishers but they need to become behavior change experts especially in the chronic disease areas.  We would love to see brand teams in these
...

By CELESA HORVATH

Last week, I wrote about the importance of cultural integration and the need for a shared vision to guide the sustainability agenda, particularly through times of leadership change.  That made me reflect on how we get to that shared vision: we start with ‘why‘.

In my view, “why?” is one of the most critical questions any organization must ask itself before embarking on a sustainability journey.

Recently, I was chatting with a...

By ANDREW CRANE AND DIRK MATTEN

This year may have lacked the huge catastrophes that have dominated the corporate responsibility headlines of the last couple of years (such as BP's oil spill in 2010 or TEPCO's nuclear disaster at Fukushima in 2011), but 2012 has probably been more packed with serious incidents than any of the previous years. We had real trouble putting these in any kind of order and even getting down to just a top 10 of big stories was tough  - and meant we...

By DAVID E. WILLIAMS

For years we’ve read that the US faces a looming shortage of nurses. Shortfalls in the hundreds of thousands of nurses are routinely predicted. These predictions have been good for nursing schools, which have used the promise of ample employment opportunities to more than double the number of nursing students over the last 10 years, according to CNN.

Yet somehow 43 percent of newly-licensed RNs can’t...

By MARCY MURNINGHAN 

Part One of Two

The TakeAway: Charitable requests are a constant, but the end of the year brings a blizzard of appeals. In addition to our donor dollars, there’s a vast amount of untapped money power held by nonprofit institutions, particularly if they have endowments. Here’s a listing of some of my favorite organizations that are seeking to build more prosperous, sustainable, and just societies. The idea is to create a “virtuous circle” of exchange...