As roles in global society change, both business and NGOs are gaining power, and with power comes a responsibility to seek legitimacy in the public debate. Governance has become an issue for corporations and NGOs alike.

While the means may differ, our visions and goals may ultimately look the same, and so it makes sense to collaborate and create meaningful new contexts. Trends are shifting from confrontation to collaboration, from single-issue initiatives to multi-issue approaches, and from a project basis to a more strategic platform.

For many years, Novo Nordisk has based its business conduct on a multi-stakeholder approach by engaging in dialogue with key stakeholders such as NGOs, neighbours, governmental regulators, doctors, nurses and patients. To be successful, such activities must rely on an unbiased attitude, a willingness to share, and a commitment to change. These are some of the key points that we take away from ten years of constructive dialogue with our stakeholders. We have also learned that investing time to build trust is the key ingredient for partnerships.

Understanding multiple agendas
For Novo Nordisk, systematic stakeholder engagement is a significant strategic tool for understanding new trends, and collecting and using knowledge and information from stakeholders. The multi-stakeholder approach helps us to align with multiple agendas and to prioritise.

Listening to stakeholders’ needs and viewing business performance against the Triple Bottom Line helps us to manage business risks, to stay tuned to the concerns of society, and to spot opportunities and potential problems. This approach fits well with the new governance models we are seeking to develop for business in the 21st century.

Stakeholder dialogue may take many forms – from factory visits to presentations at conferences, and from roundtable meetings to formal engagement through partnerships. We have active partnerships throughout the scope of living the Triple Bottom Line: on healthcare, on animal welfare, on environmental issues, on social issues and on developing business responses to the challenges of sustainable development.

Several examples are given throughout this report.

Real leadership is about recognising our own impact and resources and identifying those that may help reconcile the dilemmas confronting us. In doing that we will not only react to change, we will also drive change and help provide direction. We will continue to work across sectors, through networks and partnerships. We will also be guided by a shared vision of prosperity based on sustainable development.

Being at the UN World Summit
There is a close link between environmental deterioration and social insecurity. Each of today’s greatest environmental and social problems is challenging enough to keep governments and international agencies busy, but the combination of these problems multiplies the scale of consequences.
How we deal with these issues in this decade will be critical to our future sustainability. The UN World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa,

in 2002 marks the tenth anniversary of the Rio process. In spite of a broadening global commitment to sustainable development, social imbalances in – and between – states is on the rise, and the depletion of natural resources continues to accelerate.

We find that as a global business, we have an obligation to help reverse these trends. Thus, we engage in a number of activities to move the world along the path towards sustainable development.

Sharing responsibility for global development through the Nordic Partnership
Novo Nordisk has taken a leading role in a multi-stakeholder Nordic partnership with the aim of developing a Nordic business model for sustainable development. The model can serve as a tool for assessing ‘sustainability-readiness’ and as a checklist for identifying impacts and challenges.

As one of the four major sponsors of a programme which presently includes 15 prominent Nordic companies, Novo Nordisk is heavily involved in the Nordic Partnership Forum in Copenhagen in April 2002,

leading up to the World Summit in Johannesburg. The intention is to solicit commitment from the Nordic governments to bring the results of the conference to the table at the UN Summit.

The initiative was founded by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in the Nordic countries and House of Mandag Morgen, an independent Danish thinktank. The objective of the project is to develop a new business model which – based on Nordic values and attitudes – constitutes sustainability as an integral part of the way businesses are managed, organised and developed. The goal is to expose the dilemmas, barriers and opportunities that companies meet when working with sustainability, as well as to offer a specific proposal for how businesses can contribute to global sustainable development.

An interactive stakeholder model
How we engage in stakeholder relations depends on the nature of our relationships and the topic in question. Relations with stakeholders are not static - an individual may represent several stakeholder interests, and new stakeholders may suddenly emerge on the scene.

Likewise, the level of transparency is a factor that determines the relationship. NGO visits have provided vital input to our strategies. While previously these visits were about building a common understanding and establishing a fact-based dialogue, today we are being asked not ‘what’ we do, but rather ‘why’ we conduct our business as we do.

Nurturing stakeholder relations depends on understanding the quality of the relationship, and this is a key emphasis in our Triple Bottom Line approach.

Graph: A Novo Nordisk stakeholder model

Link: More sustainable business partnerships