As one of our corporate sustainability leaders, I’m proud to announce that Dassault Systèmes has again been included in the Corporate Knights 2015 Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations ranking, announced recently at the World Economic Forum at Davos. This is the fourth consecutive year that we’ve been honored in the ranking. For the second year, we are ranked as the #1 software company on the Global 100, and 17th overall.
The Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations ranking begins with the universe of all large companies, and narrows to the field of 100 based on 12 indicators:
- Four environmental performance indicators, centered around environmental productivity, such as dollars (euros) of revenue per kilogram of carbon emitted;
- Four social indicators, such as employee turnover;
- Three financial indicators, such as percentage of tax paid and a clean capitalism link; and
- One innovation capacity indicator, namely percentage of R&D investment.
We rank strongly on all four categories. I’m happy to say that we’re very productive in the use of our environmental assets, have a very good turnover ratio for the software sector, and have a long history of strong investments in R&D.
The Global 100 ranking values performance on an annual basis, and while we were already operating at a high level of ESG (environmental, social and governance) performance, our ESG indicators were mostly static over much of the last year. This was the primary driver of our move down from #5 overall in 2014, although we have retained the top spot in software.
As I’ve written about in the past, I’m happy about the Corporate Knights ranking, but I measure our progress in other ways. We’ve made the conscious decision to focus our resources on the innovation side of sustainability, rather than the operational. For example, in 2014 The Guardian wrote about our sustainable innovation efforts with our automotive and aerospace customers.
In North America we continue to build leadership as a sustainability leader, both operationally and by innovating with our customers. In 2014 we opened a new facility in Johnston, Rhode Island, that is LEED Silver for Core & Shell; we’ve worked to upgrade our tenant fit-out, and hope to obtain LEED Gold for Commercial Interiors. Last autumn, we hosted about 20 North American companies across all industry sectors to discuss sustainability and share best practices at our Boston Campus headquarters, as part of our membership in the GreenBiz Executive Network.
This year we’re excited about our work with the California-based Sustainable Apparel Coalition; if you haven’t heard of it, you will—the SAC will revolutionize the way that apparel and footwear is designed, produced and purchased. We’re also part of a consortium called Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise (SHINE), based here on the east coast of the US at the Harvard School of Public Health. Through the SHINE collaboration, we’re working with key sustainability leaders at Harvard and at other leading North American companies, such as Johnson & Johnson, to develop a positive-accounting methodology for sustainability called Handprinting.
We’re trying to live up to our Corporate Knights billing as the most sustainable software company by working towards the goal of being “net positive”, or leaving this biosphere better off than we found it.
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