Annalisa Gigante has been an award-winning innovator for 30 years. She serves as a board member of the Henry Royce Institute for advanced materials research and innovation and Cambridge Enterprise, Cambridge University’s seed funding and entrepreneurship hub. Annalisa is a thought leader in innovation, leadership and corporate governance. She is Chair of Foundations for Learning, the Co-Chair of Women Corporate Directors in Switzerland. In this episode she provides a European perspective of ESG, talks about the go...
Annalisa Gigante has been an award-winning innovator for 30 years. She serves as a board member of the Henry Royce Institute for advanced materials research and innovation and Cambridge Enterprise, Cambridge University’s seed funding and entrepreneurship hub. Annalisa is a thought leader in innovation, leadership and corporate governance. She is Chair of Foundations for Learning, the Co-Chair of Women Corporate Directors in Switzerland. In this episode she provides a European perspective of ESG, talks about the governance of innovation and bringing innovation to the real world.
Quotes
How Risk identification and management is driving ESG because its seen as a competitive advantage
Well, it's the definition of risk that is so important, kind of trying to understand it's both in a positive and in a negative way. You can really mitigate your risks by understanding what kind of problems you want to solve as a corporation and what kind of things are important for the company.
The fact that you can understand this as a competitive advantage is incredible in so many different things, not just in terms of what kind of products or services you put out in the market, but also in terms of employer branding or in terms of attracting the kind of investors you want. So, that's why it's an important thing to discuss really on the board level, because it has so many implications around the various stakeholders that allow your company permission to operate.
How attitudes toward ESG have changed
So, I'll just take one example in health and safety. I come from chemical industries, large manufacturing sites. It's a huge area of discussion and activity, and we used to think of these things as “what do you need to do in order to meet regulations in the various geographies in which you work?” Today we are discussing health and safety about people who've been stuck at home working on Zoom and being tired, how can we make their life easier? This is a completely different way of looking at this, and it's so important because it has a huge value add.
Tax Morality
I know that in Europe, we have a little bit of a different view about this. I've worked for American companies before, and it's not that they didn't do anything for their local community. They did a great many projects, but it was done individually, separately, each company at a time, and it is that idea of being in direct control of what it is that you choose to do as opposed to going through the tax system in order to help society. I think it’s fundamentally a product of different history that we have (in Europe).
Impact of Innovation
“Cambridge Enterprise was created to help researchers impact the real world as much as possible, to try to bring up the volume and translate fundamental research into products, services, normally, technically-based things that can have an impact in real life. This is the very particular focus of the board - having impact rather than just monetary impact. Generating royalties or seed funding is a consequence of doing the right thing as opposed to the reason why it exists, and that makes the discussion on the board so much richer.”
Big Ideas/Thoughts
On the US coming a little late to the party on ESG, but accelerating action on the part of business:
What I love about things in the US is once they get talked about, they happen quite fast, whereas in Europe, we'd be talking about it for a while and then over time we improve gradually. I think the US starting to embrace these things is going to help us create much more critical mass and then implement these things so much faster.
On funding environment in Europe compared with US at the seed stage:
In Europe, in general, we have a very different environment around VCs. When I look at equivalent research universities in the US, they mostly look after patents and royalties because the ecosystem is there to jump in to provide seed funding. This doesn't happen so much in Europe. One part of the role that I want to highlight is that whereas VCs normally look at what is the return on this idea, the job of Cambridge Enterprise is to look after the researcher, so things they do don't get completely diluted.
