Designing the sustainable enterprise

Visions of the future informed by sustainable development couple the long-term survival of humanity with a qualitative improvement in the human experience of life on earth. While the future cannot be designed explicitly, the artifacts that we create today will partially constitute the future that is tomorrow. Design is a way of organizing those artifacts, both human activity systems and technologies, so that they may contribute to an envisioned future. A design science of sustainable enterprise seeks to marry scientific and practitioner knowledge to guide the creation of enterprises (a meso-scale social artifact) that will contribute to a future consistent with the vision of sustainable development. This article addresses the question of what constitutes a sustainable enterprise by examining its essence and its purpose. Through this process two organizing principles of sustainable enterprise are identified. These organizing principles are integrated into a model of sustainable enterprise design, which provides useful insights both for advancing a design science of sustainable enterprise, and for those leaders of enterprise dedicated to making the sustainable enterprise a reality. In so doing, enterprises are positioned to contribute to the co-creation of a future of sustainable human development.