Your company’s commitment to sustainability depends on finding sustainable suppliers. What if there aren’t any? Such situations may arise more often than not — so keeping your commitment to a sustainable supply chain may mean taking a long view by making incremental improvements and encouraging suppliers to examine and change their own practices.

In the final report of our eight-year study of how corporations address sustainability, MIT Sloan Management Review and The Boston Consulting Group examine the crossroads at which sustainability now finds itself. Despite sociopolitical upheaval that threatens to reverse key gains, our research has shown that companies can develop workable — and profitable — sustainability strategies to reduce their impact on the global environment by incorporating eight key lessons.

Integrating sustainability into company operations often means partnering with government agencies as well as nonprofits. For new businesses, two important points to keep in mind are that (1) it’s never too early to start, and (2) the collaborative approaches for each partnership may not be the same.

A sustainable supply chain must operate within the limitations imposed by nature and society — but most approaches don’t explicitly take those into consideration. A new framework for supply chain sustainability assessment lays out eight key considerations organized into three categories: sustainability context, collaboration, and communication.

While most executives recognize the need to develop more sustainable business models, putting this goal into practice has been a challenge. Too many initiatives are stymied by a set of common obstacles. By recognizing how executing sustainability initiatives differs from typical change management, corporate leaders can promote more lasting gains in sustainable business development.

Investor relations managers and sustainability professionals can collaborate to communicate meaningfully with investors, converting them into a stakeholder group to help forward corporate sustainability.

Businesses looking for sustainable business models need a strategy, but there are plenty of useful tactics available. As part of our series on building abundant enterprises, we look at regenerative marketing and collaborative exchange — just two in a list of 15 possibilities.

Ignoring OECD standards that require investors to conduct environmental and human rights due diligence can expose investors to substantial risks.

Investors see a strong link between corporate sustainability performance and financial performance — so they’re using sustainability-related data as a rationale for investment decisions like never before.

As SOI matures and becomes more refined, businesses are finding more opportunities to use it as an alternative to their usual innovation processes, but more opportunities require a reliable framework for decision making.

While the most basic form of Sustainability-Oriented Innovation has led to combining sustainability practices with revenue generation, more refined forms of SOI target innovation at different stages and in different contexts. Jay, the director of the Sustainability Initiative at MIT Sloan, along with Gonzalez and Gerard, write that “SOI allows companies to push beyond their usual innovation boundaries and their typical business protocols.”

Alberto Andreu Pinillos is a pioneer in business sustainability. Asked what a CSR director does, Andreu gave a three-part answer: A CSR director sees the future, nurtures sustainability projects, and makes the post of CSR director obsolete.

Risk mitigation drove chemical giant BASF to adopt a sustainability focus, initiating a chain reaction that transformed not only the company’s product lines, but its corporate culture. The company’s vice president of sustainability strategy, Dirk Voeste, explains the step-by-step process that BASF undertook to produce a company-wide shift in this massive organization’s mindset.

Timberland LLC, a global boot and outdoor apparel manufacturer, goes beyond simply telling the world about its sustainability work. According to Betsy Blaisdell, the company’s senior manager of environmental stewardship, it has creative new ways to involve employees and to partner with suppliers — and competitors. In this interview, Blaisdell talks about the environment “nutrition label” it’s developed for its footwear, and its partnership with 60 plus apparel and footwear brands, retailers, suppliers and NGOs (from Adidas to Patagonia to DuPont to the World Resources Institute) to develop an environmental index called the Higg Index.

Trends suggest that the public is no longer satisfied with corporations that focus solely on short-term profits. A recent study comparing companies that adopted environmental and social policies with companies that didn’t supports this view. However, few companies are born with a commitment to sustainability. To develop one, companies need leadership commitment, an ability to engage with multiple stakeholders along the value chain, employee engagement and disciplined mechanisms for execution.

Just because you can’t measure an action doesn’t mean it’s not creating strategic value, says Suzanne Fallender, director of CSR Strategy and Communications for Intel. Her job, though, is to measure wherever she can and make the best case possible for incorporating sustainability efforts into every facet of the company.

Trying to create reporting standards that integrate environmental, social and governance performance along with financial information is “fraught with conflict” and an “almost political adjudication process,” says Harvard Business School’s Robert Eccles. That’s why he loves it.

Sixty-eight percent of respondents to MIT SMR’s third annual global survey say their organizations increased their commitment to sustainability in the past year. That’s a dramatic increase from 2009, when only a quarter of respondents said that. Those are among first highlights featured in the current issue of MIT SMR.