Leonardo Centre on Business for Society
Leonardo Centre on Business for Society is a cross-faculty Centre of Excellence working with scholars, businesses and global institutions to build a new model of enterprise for a flourishing economy.
Our work is organised around four pathways of change: Business for Impact, Mindset for Impact, Finance for Impact and Markets for Impact - each targeting a different lever of the economic system, and together forming a single, self-reinforcing theory of change.
We study how companies behave, not just what they say. The foundation of evidence is our GOLDEN Sustainability Dataset and the artificial intelligence algorithm, Da Vinci. We track, classify and analyse corporate sustainability actions at scale to investigate financial performance, leadership effectiveness, supply chain transformation and systemic change.
We’re organised across seven labs, converging the expertise needed to explore these complex challenges. Beyond our academic research, we work with businesses, institutions, investors and governments to co-design solutions that can scale.
Our science begins with evidence and ends with transformation – an approach we call System Impact Research.
Research impact areas
Finance for Impact
Our research shows that companies using sustainability to drive product innovation and supply chain transformation outperform the market by 40.58% over 13 years, while those focused on donations and communications underperform.
Markets for Impact
Working with Shell, Boston Consulting Group and the Rocky Mountain Institute, we are building market mechanisms to reward low-carbon chemical production across global supply chains.
Market mechanisms drive transformation across complex value chains
Mindsets for Impact
Our Leadership Lab's executive programme, Sustainability Leadership: Value-Creation Strategies for a Regenerative Future, won the Financial Times Responsible Business Education Award in 2023 and has reached more than 1,000 practitioners to date.
Equipping senior leaders to see corporate sustainability differently
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The GOLDEN Sustainability Dataset
The world's largest structured database of corporate sustainability behaviour, containing more than 2.6 million initiatives from over 23,000 companies across 100 countries and 30 years of reporting history, powering research, investment tools and policy design across all Leonardo Labs.
To find out more about our toolkit please get in touchOur influence
We work with stock exchanges including Nikkei, Nasdaq and Euronext to co-develop practical applications that embed behavioural sustainability metrics into financial decision-making. We partner with the World Bank and national governments, including the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Uzbekistan, to design country-level sustainability transition programmes.
Our Data Lab has expanded the GOLDEN dataset by 30% in the past year, in collaboration with Data Science ³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ (DSI), HEC Paris and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is on track for fourfold expansion by 2027. Our faculty contribute to applied research, industry guidance and policy design across finance, chemicals and fashion at a global scale.
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