What If Sustainability Is Where the Next Business Begins?
Originally published on Digoshen in September 2026, as part of the Beyond the Old Playbook podcast and reflection series.
Sustainability is often discussed in boardrooms through the lenses of compliance, reporting, risk management and regulatory obligations. Yet what if its greatest potential lies not in protecting existing businesses, but in imagining and creating entirely new ones?
This reflection explores how sustainability can become a driver of innovation, competitiveness and long-term value creation. As part of the Beyond the Old Playbook series, it considers why leaders and boards need to move beyond treating sustainability as a separate responsibility and instead recognise its potential to reshape business models, unlock new opportunities and strengthen organisational resilience.
Reflections
For many organisations, sustainability has become closely associated with reporting requirements, emissions targets and managing environmental and social risks. These responsibilities remain important, but they represent only part of the opportunity.
The more transformative question is how changing environmental, societal and economic conditions might create the foundations for new products, services, partnerships and business models.
This requires a shift in perspective. Rather than asking only how to make today’s business more sustainable, boards and leaders need to consider what tomorrow’s sustainable business could look like. Resource constraints, changing customer expectations, technological advances and the transition towards more circular economies can become catalysts for renewal rather than simply challenges to manage.
Such a shift also demands courage. Investing in emerging opportunities may involve uncertainty, competing time horizons and difficult choices between protecting current performance and developing future sources of value.
Perhaps sustainability’s greatest contribution to business is not simply helping organisations reduce their negative impact, but encouraging them to reconsider what value creation could mean in a changing world.
The Message
Sustainability is not only about making today’s business less harmful. It can be the starting point for creating tomorrow’s business.
For boards and leaders, the opportunity is to move beyond compliance and risk reduction towards innovation, renewal and long-term competitiveness. Sustainability and business growth need not be opposing ambitions; thoughtfully pursued, they can reinforce one another.
The question is not only how we can make our existing business more sustainable, but what new business opportunities become possible when sustainability shapes our strategic imagination.
Is sustainability primarily something your organisation manages, or is it helping you discover where your next business could begin?
Read the full reflection here
What If Sustainability Is Where the Next Business Begins? — Digoshen
About Liselotte Engstam, Digoshen & Novisali
Liselotte Engstam is an explorer of perspectives, an adventurer of ideas, a pathfinder of meaning, and a guide of timeless transitions. She bridges the worlds of board leadership and art, helping organizations and individuals navigate disruption while nurturing creativity and reflection.
As founder of Digoshen, she works with boards and leaders to expand future insights and reduce digital and sustainability blindspots. Through research, networks, and executive programs, Digoshen supports responsible value creation in the digital and sustainable age, contributing thought leadership via books, articles, events, Digoshen Exploring Leaders podcast, and blogs.
She also serves as Chair of the Boards Impact Forum in collaboration with the World Economic Forum and the Climate Governance. The Forum convenes board members, thought leaders, and experts in dialogues, webinars, and collaborative events, accelerating action on climate, AI, and sustainability.
Through her artistic practice as Novisali, Liselotte explores creativity and meaning. Her watercolors, digitally reimagined, invite reflection and renewal, offering perspectives that connect head, heart, and hand, and complementing her work with leaders and boards.
→ Discover more at www.Digoshen.com
→ Learn more at www.BoardsImpactForum.com
→ Find more about Liselotte at www.liselotteengstam.com and her Google Scholar page
→ Explore Liselotte’s art and reflections at www.novisali.com and follow on Instagram @novisali_arts