Sustainability vision and strategy
As a focused healthcare company, Novo Nordisk is committed to leading the fight against diabetes. In this promise lies a clear business rationale and a social commitment deeply rooted in the company’s Triple Bottom Line approach to doing business.
The Triple Bottom Line as a business principle
One of the Vision statements is:
Our values are expressed in all our actions
Decency is what counts. Every day we strive to find the right balance between compassion and competitiveness, the short and the long term, self and commitment to colleagues and society, work and family life.
Novo Nordisk ‘strives to conduct its business in a financially, environmentally and socially responsible way’. This statement is anchored in the Articles of Association and embraces the principles upon which the company was founded.
This formal commitment to sustainable development and balanced growth has been built into the corporate governance structures, management tools and individual performance assessments. The Brundtland Commission’s principle of ‘preserving the planet while improving the quality of life for its current and future inhabitants’ resonates well with Novo Nordisk’s business rationale and its values-based approach. This is what lies behind the Triple Bottom Line, which the company has adopted as a broad business principle.
This way, the commercial vision and the sustainability vision are intertwined. Novo Nordisk believes that a holistic business approach will create long-term shareholder value, as it enables the company to stay attuned to societal trends and challenges. Building stakeholder trust is essential to earn and maintain the company’s licence to operate and innovate.
The aspiration is to position Novo Nordisk as a 21st century business model: a sustainable company, a trusted partner and one that is recognised as a healthcare company with a heart.
Governance
To pursue this aspiration the company has set up a cross-functional forum, the TBL (Triple Bottom Line) Leadership Forum, aiming to
- drive Novo Nordisk’s TBL leadership
- further develop the TBL principle, including stakeholder engagement, and ensure business integration
- ensure overall TBL strategy development and governance
- ensure development of reporting, management, accountability and verification
- drive integration of financial and non-financial accounting
- synergise activities in the individual units to maximise impacts, both internally and externally.
The Novo Nordisk Learning Curve
Ongoing stakeholder engagement and trendspotting help identify new issues which are or could become material to Novo Nordisk. The Novo Nordisk learning curve is a tool that aligns the process of defining materiality with integration into business practices. Emerging issues that are identified as relevant and potentially material are included at the bottom of the learning curve.
Following a review of its implications for Novo Nordisk’s long-term business, a strategy is framed for those issues that are deemed material, and subsequently data, indicators and targets are identified. Stakeholder engagement is part of this process. Once management of the issue has been embedded in the organisation so that it is fully integrated into business processes, the strategy will be revisited as appropriate.
See specific strategies and performance in 2006 for individual areas such as environmental management, climate change, bioethics, responsible sourcing, diversity, access to health, socio-economics and responsible lobbying.
Corporate responsibility as a driver of innovation in healthcare
Principles of responsibility have been or are being embedded into standard operating procedures for responsible sourcing, clinical trials and business ethics, production, transport etc.
Novo Nordisk is actively participating in the development and dissemination of global standards for corporate accountability. For instance, the company is taking an active part in the framing of the ISO 26000 standard for social responsibility, expected to be launched in 2008.
The approach to corporate responsibility appears to be shifting from a risk management rationale to the recognition that corporate responsibility can be a driver of innovation. Read an extended argument on the issue by Lise Kingo in her inauguration speech as professor by special appointment at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.
Three key points are made in the speech, :
- We need to understand the dynamics of societal change and how the roles and responsibilities of business change in consequence.
- Businesses can learn to anticipate and manage the changes in stakeholder expectations and should use this insight to build their power to innovate.
- Businesses can harness the building blocks of corporate sustainability to develop new, more inclusive business designs.
Changing Diabetes
Providing care for people with diabetes has been the focus for Novo Nordisk’s strategic business development and, over the years, also for how the company approaches the sustainability agenda. The aspiration of defeating diabetes is explicitly stated in the company Vision and Way of Management, as is the commitment to actively engage with stakeholders for more sustainable solutions that benefit both the company and society. By establishing the link with health as a driver of wealth, it has been possible to pursue Triple Bottom Line strategies in a way that increasingly gets to the heart of core business processes – in the markets as well as in corporate functions and governance mechanisms. The approach is shaped through extensive stakeholder engagement, followed by embedding in organisational behaviour and business operations.
Novo Nordisk’s promise of Changing Diabetes is an expression of the company’s sustainability vision. It is evolving as global, company-wide activities, anchored in a corporate strategy and implemented locally in the markets and at production sites and research & development centres. Elements include advocacy, education and training, support for building healthcare infrastructure, alliances and partnerships, and marketing. The Changing Diabetes activities are examples of Novo Nordisk’s multi-stakeholder engagement approach to doing business. Please click here to download the article 'Global drive to change diabetes' from the 2006 printed Annual Report.
This page has been assessed by PricewaterhouseCoopers as part of its assessment of Novo Nordisk’s statement that it reports ‘in accordance’ with GRI. Please refer to Audit and assurance for a full description of the nature of assurance offered.
