Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
people with access to micro-credit to allow them to improve their houses and
invest in businesses. Traditional banks, reliant on professional expertise, regarded
poor people seeking small loans as unprofitable. Grameen built a different
model, based on pro-am expertise. It employs a small body of professionals,
who train an army of barefoot bankers. Village committees administer most of
Grameen's loans. This pro-am workforce makes it possible to administer millions
of tiny loans cost-effectively. By 2003, Grameen had lent more than US$4 billion
to about 2.8 million Bangladeshis, including 570,000 mortgages to build tin
roofs for huts to keep people dry during the monsoons. Had Grameen relied on
traditional, professional models of organization it would only have reached a
tiny proportion of the population.
(2004: 1)
In 2006, Mohammed Yunnus and the Grameen Bank were jointly awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize for their work.
The adoption of environmentally and socially responsible business practices can
open up an additional range of opportunities for entrepreneurs. The move to a
sustainable business framework provides numerous niches that enterprising individuals
and firms can successfully identify and service. These include the development of
new products and services, improvements to the efficiency of existing firms, new
methods of marketing, and the reconfiguration of existing business models and
practices. Green entrepreneurship, writes Schaper (2002), provides new opportunities
for first movers who are able to spot and exploit opportunities, gaps in the market
and new ideas. Green entrepreneurship can also act as a change agent within the
wider business community, particularly when this wider business community
recognizes that green business is good, profitable and rewarding. Green entrepreneurs
will then exert a 'pull' that motivates others to become more proactive in their
developments, which, if additionally supported by the 'push' factor articulated through
revised government regulation, green taxation, and stakeholder and pressure-group
lobbying, could make a considerable impact. As Robert Isaak writes:
Businesses that are not designed to be sustainable decrease our health, shorten
our time on Earth and destroy the heritage we leave for our children, no matter
where we are located globally. In contrast, green-green businesses are models
that can help show the way to increase productivity while reducing resource use
in a manner that is harmonious with human health and the sustainability of
non-human species as well. Green start-ups make it easier to 'fix' environmental
components and processes from the outset. Green subsidiaries of larger firms
can foster innovation and bring back the heightened motivation of social solidarity
to businesses where it may be all too easy to slip into cynicism in an era of
global economic crises.
(2002: 81-91)
But if sustainability or green entrepreneurship requires integration, then so does
the creation and implementation of a corporate sustainability strategy. From a business
development perspective, it also goes beyond Henry Mintzberg's five 'Ps' of strategy
- plan, ploy, pattern, position and perspective (Mintzberg, 1987). As Michael Blowfield
(2013: 111) has written, many companies who decide they need to position themselves
