In our new economic era, sustainability isn’t a tradeoff for businesses—it’s a driver of competitive advantage. Even still, many businesses continue to narrowly frame sustainability as a compliance obligation. They get preoccupied with reporting, functionally separating sustainability considerations from business strategy.

BCG’s Sustainable Business Model Innovation (SBM-I) points to new modes of differentiation for businesses by embedding societal value into products, processes, and services and reshaping business ecosystems. When businesses view sustainability as integral to their strategy, sustainability and strategic aims become mutually reinforcing, such that new models of competition and sustainable value creation emerge.

To better understand how far companies have come in creating such new models, BCG teamed up with The Australian Financial Review to launch an annual “Sustainability Leaders” competition in 2021. We opened the contest to Australia- and New Zealand-based organizations, as well as global organizations that have been operating in either country for at least a year. We focused on companies using sustainable business models in order to identify truly exceptional performers. Our hope was that highlighting how these pioneering organizations work could help galvanize a wider range of companies to explore sustainable business models to boost competitiveness and value creation. From 2021 to 2024, BCG and The Australian Financial Review evaluated some 300 entrants, allowing us to use the region as a laboratory to test sustainable business models and giving us insight into what was working and what was not.^[1]The contest continues in 2025, run by The Australian Financial Review and a new partner.

Each entrant submitted an innovation embedded in their organization that contributed to better environmental and social outcomes—and created tangible business value. These business plans were then evaluated using a modified version of our SBM-I framework. Participants included ASX20 companies and multinationals, early-stage ventures, public institutions, and industry bodies. Submissions were assessed in four areas: environmental and societal benefits, business benefits, business model change, and industry impact.