Karnpisith Juke Laorpaksa, GMBA Class of 2017
What is a sustainability?
It’s not environmentalism or a complex business model. According to Christopher Dossman from Alesca Life; sustainability is smart business. The common topic for our guest speakers in this event is sustainability. Three representatives of three companies came to share their insight of their industry and share how their companies created their own sustainable business model.
Mark Lyons the Global Vice President of Alltech, an American agriculture company, shared his insight of the Chinese agriculture. Alltech’s business model is built on solutions that will help Chinese agriculture to overcome its challenges. To make their business more sustainable they have initiated a Model Operating Farm in south China. This model will be a research and education center, and work as a model for the future of the Chinese agriculture.
Yi Zhang, CSR and sustainability manager of Shangri-La hotel shared the Shangri-La’s way of building a sustainable business model. Shangri-La’s model does not only cover a small and specific area such as food, but they try to implement their sustainable business model in every part of their business, from construction to restaurants. As a result of constructing their own hotels, Shangri-La has been able to apply more sustainable methods in constructions and customize their building to be more energy and water saving.
To be more sustainable on the food front, Shangri-La created strict food requirements for their suppliers and a concept called “Rooted in Nature” which tells Shangri-La’s guests that food with this label is local and grown in an environmentally friendly way.
Last but not least Christopher Dossman from Alesca Life presented his startup company Alesca Life. His business is trying to make agriculture more fun and efficient. Their solution allows restaurants, hotels and others to grow their own plants in glass capsules. By offering this solution, they are making agriculture more environmentally friendly, efficient, and fun. Their goal is to make the capsules in big scales and o er people locally grown food instead of imported food.
All these three business cases gave us an understanding of how sustainable businesses can be built. More importantly, these cases tell us that a sustainable business model is possible in even more traditional industries such as hospitality.
Net Impact 2015
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