Greening the Business - Unilever UK's Sustainable Living Plan & the UK's Clean Growth Strategy

Current Contributions

According to the learning outcomes for this module, this assignment will demonstrate that students can:

1. Exhibit a comprehensive understanding and sound judgement in developing proposals and solutions to reduce the impact of organisations as they seek to respond to climate change risks
2. Apply a range of advanced technical, academic and professional skills to evaluate and critically reflect on current trends in engineering for sustainability such as lifecycle analysis, green accounting, carbon trading, and risk assessment.

Tasks to be undertaken:

The UK Government’s Industrial Strategy describes a partnership between government and the private sector to build the foundations of a strong economy, which are the skills of its workers, the quality of its infrastructure and a fair and predictable business environment. The strategy aims to foster innovation and identifies four ‘Grand Challenges’, one of which is clean growth. Your company has been recruited by Unilever UK, and you have been given the lead role as the Greening the Business consultant to recommend one or more innovations to potentially help align Unilever’s corporate and community sustainability strategy with that of the UK Government's clean growth strategy. Assume a pre-Brexit UK regulatoryframework and operating context.

Your task is to critically review Unilever UK's low impact and green growth strategies. These are "Our strategy for sustainable growth"  and "Our strategy for sustainable growth The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan", available at Using these two documents as your source of information on Unilever UK’s sustainable living strategy, and selecting no more than three product lines or strategy themes (or a mix), as the lead consultant your responsibility is to write a management report which covers the following:

Section 1: Introduction and Current Contributions:

Provide a brief introduction explaining your understanding of what clean growth means in the context of the UK. You will refer to no less than three fully referenced and summarised sustainability-related regulatory policies/ frameworks/ laws as these apply to Unilever UK’s corporate footprint.

Section Two: Disruptive innovation for a greener business

(2.1.) Briefly introduce and discuss your understanding of a disruptive innovation and propose one or more disruptive innovation(s) to Unilever UK. Justify how adopting the innovation(s) will help contribute to greater alignment between Unilever and the UK's clean growth strategy. Y

Unilever's Board will only be convinced by evidence-based arguments. A minimum of four relevant academic journal articles are to be used to support your arguments in this section. Please use correct citation (Harvard, APA or IEEE) formatting.

(2.2.) Assuming the Board is sufficiently convinced by your recommendations, this section concerns stakeholder analysis and management. Identify those stakeholders who you think will be involved with the process of adopting your proposal(s). Remember to think holistically across the supply chain. State why you identified them as stakeholders and their roles in the process of adoption. Estimate their interest and influence and map these parameters onto Mandelow's matrix and discuss how you would work with them throughout.

Section Three: Discussion and Conclusions

(3) Provide a brief summary of sections one and two, and then identify and discuss any realistic risks and challenges to the adoption of your proposed innovation. Provide potential mitigating options which take these into account. Briefly discuss any impacts these options may have on

aligning Unilever's sustainable living strategy with the UK Government's clean growth strategy. This assignment will also require careful reading of the lessons used in this module as well as library database research, and please use the official UK Government website to access and reference regulatory frameworks.

This should be written as a practical report for decision makers rather than a theoretical treatise on innovation and sustainability. Your assignment should be in the form of a management report to a maximum length of 2,500 words (± 10%) excluding any references, tables, charts, footnotes, and appendices.necessary, but the appendices should be no longer than 5 pages. You should explain any pictures and diagrams you use, reference your sources correctly and choose suitable sources. You should use a font of size no less than 10 points.

How the work will be marked:

Your assignment report will be based on the extent to which the learning outcomes have been met, and the extent to which the above instructions, notes and guidance are complied with (for example regarding word limit, style, structure and citation).

• Section One – Introduction and clean growth
• Section Two (2.1. Disruptive innovation)
• Section Two (2.2. Stakeholder analysis)
• Section Three – Discussion and Conclusions
• Clarity of writing style, referencing and structure of report

Work that is deficient in most of the respects outlined above, showing no evidence of critical analysis or a failure to follow this brief will be awarded an outright fail of 44% or less.

A marginal fail of 45% to 49% may be awarded to work that demonstrates some understanding of the problem but where the understanding, accuracy, organisation and critical analysis fail to justify a marginal pass.