It might reasonably be argued that David Even, founder of sustainable footwear business Primal Soles, is making the world more sustainable, one step at a time.
Even set up his Amsterdam-based company in 2021, with a mission to reduce landfill waste by at least 1mn pieces of footwear each year. It says its pioneering product, made using natural Mediterranean cork, is the first 100 per cent recyclable insole on the market.
By the time the Bocconi MBA alumnus won 2023’s Responsible Business Education student prize, his business had already travelled a long way. It had established a manufacturing operation in Portugal, using cork sheets, supplied by Amorim, the world’s largest cork producer.
But being at 2023’s World Economic Forum in Davos to receive his award enabled Even to accelerate his start-up’s growth. He used the opportunity to pitch himself to the investors, entrepreneurship advisers and senior executives who attend the annual leadership conference in the Swiss Alps.
“Once I knew I was going to Davos, I prepared the delivery of my presentation night and day,” he says, noting that he embraced the chance to “plug my firm”, as well as pleading for WEF attendees “to make a better world”.
Primal Soles’ advisory board now includes two people he met at that event: André Hoffmann, vice-chair of multinational healthcare group Roche, and Barbara Dubach, chief executive of Innovate 4 Nature, which acts as a matchmaker bringing conservation and sustainable businesses together with investors and customers.
Dubach encouraged Even to add another product line to his business: hotel slippers. “I take my insoles out of my shoe to demonstrate them to people,” Even says. “Barbara saw this and said, ‘Why don’t you do hotel slippers?’”
Primal Soles recently took its first order for slippers, supplying 60,000 pairs to Amsterdam’s Hotel Jakarta, which has made sustainability part of its brand. Even notes a symbolic element to the deal: Dutch traders in the days of the Netherlands’ colonisation of Indonesia went to Jakarta to extract natural resources; today, Primal Soles makes footwear that can be returned to the earth.
“We are saying that, instead of guest slippers being a financial cost to a hotel because they are single use, they could be made to be a financial benefit because of the lower costs of recycling,” he says. “Maximum comfort, minimum footprint.”
The company’s next product launch, in the summer of 2025, will be recyclable sliders — slip-on shoes likened to flip-flops. For that, Even is preparing a $1mn seed funding round, with clothing retailer H&M’s venture group.
Harnessing behavioural insights
Nicole Robitaille aims to spread the word about the benefits of sustainable activity from her position as assistant professor of marketing at the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University, Ontario. She was among the winners of 2023’s academic research award, which recognises researchers whose work helps companies and other organisations function better.
The prize was in recognition of behavioural insights gained by her and her university team researching the gap between public intention and practice in organ donation registration. Consequently, recommendations adopted by Ontario saw organ donation registration increase from 24 per cent of eligible adults at the time of research to 35 per cent when the FT award was received.
The award also enabled Robitaille and her team to move into very different fields — for example, helping energy companies better manage power supply by nudging domestic and business customers to use electricity outside peak hours.
“Firms were shown that they could do simple things like reduce their air conditioning by a few degrees, or shift their hours of operation,” Robitaille says. This saved companies hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in electricity costs and cut the number of carbon offsets needed from power production.
“Academics have to work with business to focus on these real-world problems and share their work in more accessible formats, not just get them published in academic journals,” Robitaille argues. “We need to do so much work,” she adds, “[by] taking the broader perspective and trying to work together.”
Persistence is important, though seeing your insights turned into practical results, such as a reduction in carbon emissions, is a good motivator, she says. “This work is really challenging, but it is also the most rewarding work you can do.”
Keeping a course relevant
With the issue of climate change, there is no time to waste, says Thomas Lagoarde-Segot, teacher and researcher at Kedge Business School, in France. His leadership role in the institution’s ecological macroeconomics course — which ‘‘is changing every year because the world is changing”, he says — won him a teacher award last year.
The award has proved valuable for Kedge in raising the profile of what the school has been doing in areas such as socially responsible investment, adds Lagoarde-Segot. Embracing sustainability is one way for a business school to make itself attractive to potential students in what is an increasingly competitive market for business masters degree courses. With Kedge not as well known as such French schools as Insead and HEC Paris, the award brought with it some welcome “external validation”, he notes.
Sustained focus on sustainability
Colorado State University College of Business was among the winners of the best overall school award last year. Its teaching on responsible business management has helped increase student enrolment by 35 per cent since 2020. Record undergraduate enrolment numbers this year are attributed by dean Beth Walker, , at least in part, to the school’s sustainability credentials and its endorsement by the FT award.
“People are coming to us because we have a purpose to deliver a responsible business education,” Walker says. Transforming a business school into one focused on sustainability takes time, however, and she notes that integrating it into teaching is more difficult for some subjects than others.
“The most common question I get from other deans is, ‘How do you convince your faculty to focus on responsible business management education?’” Walker says. “It is about ensuring everyone feels included. We bring people along slowly, and allow people to lean in, in the way that they are most comfortable with.”
Prioritising the planet over plastics
Students may also need time to come up with ways to build sustainable business concepts. Johanna Baare had spent six years working at a start-up consultancy before starting the Global MBA at Madrid’s IE Business School in 2018. As she progressed through the programme, she realised that she wanted to be a founder herself.
She initially acted as a mentor to the person who would become her co-founder, Anne Lamp, who had invented a sustainable alternative to plastic. The pair realised that their technical and business backgrounds were complementary so, in September 2020, they co-founded Traceless Materials to bring the product to market. The Hamburg-based company’s material pellets are now sold to manufacturers, who transform them into biodegradable products and packaging, which are used by Traceless partners, such as the retailer C&A.
Winning the FT alumni changemaker award in 2022 enabled Traceless to reach a wider audience. But it also showed that acting sustainably makes good business sense — at a time when protecting the environment can be seen to be in conflict with economic issues such as inflation and growth, according to Baare.
“We see how the political landscape is evolving in many parts of the world [and] that raises concerns about how high sustainability is in . . . decision making,” she says. “Awards like this show how many driven people there are working in all kinds of businesses to bring sustainable solutions to the market.”
The big challenge for Traceless, like other start-ups, is to do more. “We are very lucky, with a team of over 60 people, who are highly motivated by the impact they can make with Traceless. Yes, we are a solution, but we also need to scale up.”
This is particularly important when it comes to sustainability because the task ahead is so great, adds Baare. “We need more partners, and others, to develop similar solutions. We also need more customers. We can only achieve this if we all work together.”
While accepting the challenges ahead, Baare has an entrepreneur’s optimism that solutions to her company’s scale-up challenges — and those of the wider sustainability industry — can be overcome.
“We are constantly looking for new talent and, fortunately, we get amazing applications from people that are very well experienced in business and have the motivation to work for us, because they want to do something good with their time at work.”
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