King's College London

Researchers and practitioners came together at King’s Business School for the Centre for Sustainable Business (CSB) annual conference, Sustainability in Practice. The event focused on how research can deliver real-world impact and support organisations working towards sustainable change.

Across four themed sessions – sustainability for leadership, sustainable business systems, sustainable finance, and sustainable consumption – speakers explored how collaboration between academia and industry can address urgent challenges.

Here our Researchers share some of the key insights from the day.

Turning research into real-world impact

A central theme of the conference was how partnerships between researchers and practitioners can lead to meaningful change.

Sessions highlighted how combining academic insight with industry experience can create practical solutions, from improving supply chain standards to engaging employees in sustainability initiatives. Speakers stressed that working together helps ensure research addresses real-world needs and creates clear pathways for impact.

Sustainability communications: engaging people in action

How can companies engage employees in sustainability at scale? Dr Byungdoo Kim, Research Associate at the Centre for Sustainable Business, reflects on this session, which explored a collaboration between King’s Business School and marketing firm HH Global to test which communication approaches are most effective:

Engaging a global workforce in sustainability is a challenge for large organisations. With 5,000 employees across 64 countries and dozens of languages, the marketing-activation firm HH Global faced this problem and brought it to King’s Business School. At our recent conference, Matteo Montecchi, Andrés Gvirtz, and Kevin Dunckley discussed the resulting collaboration.

Rather than relying on a conventional top-down message, the project allowed employees to vote on which environmental initiatives the company would fund, working with the nature-technology firm Pinwheel. The underlying premise was that offering people a genuine choice increases engagement and ownership.

The King’s team then designed a field experiment to identify which communication approaches were most effective. Several findings emerged. Personalised messaging consistently outperformed standardised content. Techniques established in behavioural research—much of it conducted in the US and UK—did not always hold across other regions and cultures. And projects framed around visible elements of nature tended to resonate more than those framed around carbon.

The partnership paired the company’s real-world reach with the rigour of academic method, producing insights neither could have generated alone. The campaign became the most successful internal initiative in the company’s history and prompted several follow-on projects. The wider lesson is that well-designed communication can be a meaningful lever for sustainability and that close collaboration between businesses and researchers is a productive way to achieve it.

Modern slavery: building shared understanding and action

Tackling modern slavery in supply chains requires more than awareness. It needs practical tools, shared understanding and strong collaboration.

In this session, Gabriela Gutierrez-Huerter O (KCL), Andreana Drencheva (KCL), Melissa Eisdell (British Standards Institution) explored a partnership between King’s Business School and the British Standards Institution (BSI) to support adoption of BS 25700, a standard on organisational responses to modern slavery. The team brought together businesses, government and non-governmental organisations through a series of “learning labs” designed to encourage open discussion and shared learning.

Rather than taking a top-down approach, the labs created space for participants to reflect on their own practices, challenge assumptions and learn from others. This helped build a clearer understanding of how organisations can identify risks and respond effectively.

The project reached more than 160 organisations and has already influenced policy discussions, including contributions to a UK Parliament inquiry on forced labour. It also produced practical outputs, including a toolkit and a forthcoming white paper.

A key takeaway was that adopting a standard is a journey. Organisations need time to test, adapt and embed new approaches. Progress is often uneven, and collaboration requires flexibility, trust and ongoing effort.

The session showed that standards can provide a useful framework, but real impact comes from working closely with organisations to support change in practice.

Facilitating Community Impact among Purpose Practitioners in Times of Uncertainty

Asma Othman, PhD Student in Strategy, International Management, and Entrepreneurship, highlighted key themes from this session on how organisations can sustain purpose in times of uncertainty:

How can organisations sustain purpose when geopolitical tensions, economic uncertainty, and changing leadership reshape business priorities?

This question framed a session led by Lauren Elliott (NatWest) and Hannah Schupfer (King's College London), who explored how communities of purpose practitioners help organisations embed purpose during periods of uncertainty. 

Hannah Schupfer has presented the “Hype Cycle” around Corporate Purpose, explaining how corporate purpose has shifted from initial hype and heightened legitimacy towards a backlash, driven by geopolitical tensions and economic uncertainty. 

Lauren Elliott introduced the Purpose Practitioners Community, which brings together practitioners from organisations across various sectors to address a common challenge: organisations want to become purpose driven but often lack the organisational structures and mindsets needed to make that transition. Furthermore, professionals in roles dedicated to purpose often experienced a sense of isolation and uncertainty about how to develop their mandates. The community enables practitioners to collectively test ideas, exchange experiences, and develop practical approaches that members take back into their organisations to strengthen their impact as purpose professionals.

Drawing on the Measurement and Performance Lab, Hannah Schupfer, presented the insights from the community workshops.

The practice community explores ongoing challenges and collectively designs solutions in various “Labs”, whereas the speakers presented insights from the most recent one on measuring purpose and reframing value. Financial value remains institutionally established, while environmental and social value often lacks the legitimacy needed to influence organisational priorities. The discussion identified legitimacy, authority, temporal horizons, and psychological safety as key conditions that determine whether broader forms of value become integrated into organisational decision making. It also argued that organisations need a shift from reactive compliance towards creative experimentation, where new approaches to measuring value can be tested and refined.

The session also addressed the relationship between academia and practice. Businesses seek guidance while organisational change is unfolding, whereas academic evidence often develops retrospectively over longer time-frames. The speakers argued that closer collaboration can generate evidence alongside organisational transformation, allowing research to inform practice while capturing emerging organisational change in real time.

The audience discussion extended these themes by asking how practitioners translate learning from collaborative communities back into large organisations, where colleagues have not shared the same learning journey. Questions also examined where tipping points for purpose driven business are emerging, how facilitation methods uncover organisational assumptions, and how geopolitical differences are shaping organisations' willingness to communicate their purpose agendas publicly.

Sustainable finance: the role of advice and understanding

Dr Yunus Isik, Research Associate at the Centre for Sustainable Business, reflected on a session on recent trends in sustainable investing. The session featured Nick Britton from the Association of Investment Companies (AIC), alongside Dr Ylva Baeckström and Thora Frost from King’s Business School:

One discussion point was the role of financial advisers. Nick argued that advisers can be very powerful as they shape client decisions, but they interpret client needs differently. As an example, Dr Baeckström’s research shows that advisers judge clients differently based on gender. Seeing male clients more confident and knowledgeable, advisers give them more risk-oriented recommendations. Moreover, many advisors do not proactively raise sustainability unless clients mention it first. Only a relatively small proportion of clients raise sustainability themselves. This means advisers could play an important role in sustainable investing simply by asking clients whether sustainability matters to them.

Thora then introduced AIC survey data which was collected to understand investor expectations and generate better public communication around sustainable investing. It tracks UK retail investors’ attitudes toward sustainability over five years. The data shows that attitudes toward sustainability have fluctuated over time. Interest dipped in 2024, then rose again. Around 60% of investors remained supportive of ESG investing. The speakers suggested that there is some scepticism and disengagement in the UK, but not the same level of hostility seen in the United States recently.

The UK’s new sustainability investment labels were another focus of the talk. Even though many investors said in 2024 that they intend to use the new labels, actual use in 2025 was lower. The strongest factor associated with label use was whether investors understood the labels which makes education crucial if the labels are to help ordinary investors make sustainable investment choices.

Looking ahead

The CSB conference highlighted the value of bringing together different perspectives to tackle sustainability challenges. By connecting research with practice, the Centre continues to support work that delivers impact beyond academia.