Context: In this earlier post I concluded with a statement about existing accounting frameworks that could help IBM and their clients to measure triple bottom line impact. One of the IBM’ers asked for more resources. I’m not an expert on triple bottom line issues. Please post other resources here in the comments area. Thanks!

GRI is a major international accounting standards initiative, and they’ve been involved with many major organizations. That’s the best place to start.

There are some competing methodologies, and not a lot of debate about which is best, because ultimately the social science doesn’t exist to assign empirical value to human values. I should stick to listing resources, but as an aside, it seems clear that we need something like the GRI, right or wrong; standards will promote increasingly regular practices, and over time these practices will evolve into more sophisticated standards. That’s my personal view. Others are much more engaged in this space than I am.

John Elkington is a leader in the field, and he’s written an influential book titled “Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business”. He is also a professional consultant, and has co-founded a group called SustainAbility.

One of the interesting and innovative people working on the quantification challenge is a woman named Sara Olsen. She has founded the Social Venture Technology Group to help prospective investors evaluate Social Return On Investment (SROI).

A group with well established measurement methods is REDF. Their work seems to build on benefit-cost analysis methods as practiced in the development community.

Redefining Progress is perhaps best known for the ecological footprint concept. Personally I’m not a huge fan of that narrative, but I respect their success in capturing people’s attention. I am a big fan for their Genuine Progress Indicator as a more informative alternative to GDP, but I don’t suspect business leaders are quite ready for that yet. Regardless, Redefining Progress has done a lot of work with economists in the area of sustainability metrics.

[tags]IBM, Innovation Jam, sustainability metrics, triple bottom line[/tags]