I am pleased to share that our new paper, co-authored with Jacopo Cricchio, Valentina Cucino, Gianmaria Ontano, and Andrea Piccaluga, has been published in Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management.
“Towards a Biodiversity Positive Business Strategy: The Monitoring, Conserving, Restoring, Valorizing (MCRV) Framework” is the result of several years of research, discussion and fieldwork around a question that is becoming increasingly relevant for companies: what does it really mean to integrate biodiversity into business strategy?
Much of the current debate frames biodiversity as a risk to be managed, an ESG indicator to report, or an externality to compensate for. While these perspectives are important, they capture only part of the picture. Our paper argues that biodiversity can also become a source of innovation, strategic renewal, and value creation.
To explain how, we introduce the MCRV Framework, built around four complementary capabilities: Monitoring, Conserving, Restoring and Valorizing.
Monitoring means developing the ability to understand a company’s impacts and dependencies on biodiversity. Conserving brings biodiversity protection into strategic and operational decisions. Restoring moves beyond reducing harm, focusing instead on the regeneration of ecosystems. Valorizing is the most explicitly innovation-oriented dimension: it concerns the ability to translate biodiversity-related knowledge into new technologies, products, services and business models.
The paper therefore proposes an important shift in perspective: from asking how companies can reduce their negative impact on biodiversity to asking how biodiversity can become part of the way companies innovate and create value.
For me, this publication also reflects the work carried out over the past few years as Innovation Director of the National Biodiversity Future Center (NBFC). One of the Centre’s key ambitions has been to ensure that cutting-edge biodiversity research does not remain confined to academic publications and laboratories, but is translated into technologies, startups, services, and business models that can create tangible economic and societal impact.
In this sense, the paper complements the innovation work developed within NBFC. Research provides a framework for understanding what a biodiversity-positive business strategy may look like; the NBFC experience provides a unique setting in which to observe how these ideas can be translated into practice.
Finally, tihs publication is also the outcome of a long collaborative journey. A special thanks goes to Jacopo Cricchio, Valentina Cucino, Gianmaria Ontano and Andrea Piccaluga for the discussions, ideas and work that made this research possible.
Image: Martin Johnson Heade, Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds, 1871. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Public Domain.
