At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, the ranking agency Corporate Knights released its annual list of the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations, and Dassault Systèmes is proud to be ranked second overall. This is the fifth consecutive year that we’ve made the Global 100 list, and third in which we’ve taken the top spot for any software company. If you’re curious about the criteria that Corporate Knights uses to arrive at the Global 100, the ESG (environmental, social, and governance) metrics that they evaluate are explained in this post.
While we really don’t do it for the rankings, we appreciate the recognition of our sustainability group’s efforts. 2015 was an especially critical year for sustainability. The World Expo in Milan, which we sponsored with its theme of “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life”, set the tone in spring through autumn. Last December, we also sponsored the COP21 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris and witnessed the world’s governments, businesses, and social leaders unite to write a historic climate pledge.
At events like these, we’re talking with fellow sustainability leaders about how to evolve the practice of corporate sustainability toward one that is all-encompassing of the systemic effects of a company’s full value chain. One big announcement that we made at COP21 was the culmination of over two years’ effort with the Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise, a consortium led out of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health: we released a seminal case study that looks at the positive impacts—that is, the handprint—of 3D technology.
This case study, which I co-authored with Dr. Gregory Norris of the Harvard SHINE Initiative, showed that innovations from eco-design in automobiles can prevent 300-600 million metric tons CO2-equivalent from the automotive sector over a five-year period. Since these innovations depend on the use of 3D technology, this study demonstrates the role of Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform in advancing sustainable practices in the design, simulation, and manufacture of such innovations. The potential for Dassault Systèmes to enable handprints in the automotive sector alone is 10,000 times greater than our total carbon footprint associated with authoring and delivering our 3DEXPERIENCE software—these are the systemic effects that can truly change the world.
Several of the other Global 100 companies are our customers, too and we’re working with a number of them to help co-create a more sustainable world. For example, we’re partnering with Dell on advancing the handprinting and “net-positive” methodology to which the paper cited above contributes. We look forward to the day when rankings take into account not just a company’s eco-efficiency, but also its full range of effects, including its supply chain and its products.
I hope Dassault Systèmes would rank highly on such an index of true world citizenship as well.
As our CEO Bernard Charlès stated in an editorial leading up to COP21:
“A sustainable world calls for more imagination and innovation in science, uses and economic models. …Rather than simply improving things, the challenge now is to produce things in ways that have never been used before and to learn in ways that have never been applied before. And to do this, we need to innovate, innovate, innovate!”
