Strategic applications of the key research question for companies

The central research question for companies is: Per dollar contribution to GDP, how much is the company increasing or decreasing global overshoot?

Once this can be answered, many other additional analytics that may inform the company’s business case and strategic planning can be performed. Key questions would include:

• Check alignment: What domains of the company (if not all) build on business models that deliver on global overshoot reduction, i.e., areas that when expanded would also reduce global overshoot?
• Document your resource situation: Is the company net positive? What are the resource savings in the world compared to resource use within company? What is the ratio for the whole company and by different parts of the company (not just CO₂, and beyond the company boundaries, but its impact on global overshoot)
• Monitor change over time: For instance, track resource saving to resource use ratios. This helps to evaluate whether the company is physically getting better at delivering resource efficiency?
• Assess market potential and market penetration: How much can Earth Overshoot Day be moved by the existing technologies as compared to how much current efforts are moving it? For example, in the case of the company Schneider Electric, Global Footprint Network, together with their engineers, estimated that their current total market potential is moving Earth Overshoot Day 21 days (page 26). This is based on current on-the-shelf, positive-financial-return technology. This assessment gives insight into how much of this is captured by the current market (including competitors). Also, it shows how saturated the market is, and how much is captured by the company alone.
• Compare yourself to competitors (efficiency gap): How close is the company’s competition?
• Identify innovation opportunities for existing or new product and service lines: Where are economic (profitable) opportunities to cut global overshoot?
• Track the relationship between resource efficiency and profitability in various company domains: Are the resource efficiency gains of the company paying off?

These analytics are not compliance driven (although they may help). They are focused on giving companies strategic insights to produce more opportunities for the company.

The same approach also applies to portfolios, for instance, of investment funds. It moves the more theoretical conversation about “impact” into more practical, strategy-relevant realms.