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Visiting Prof, Halmstad University, Sweden
Flourishing Enterprise Designer
Cofounder, Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group
Cofounder, Flourishing Enterprise Institute
Principal, Edward James Consulting Ltd
Please see LinkedIn for the most recent information
My intention is: take action to enable flourishing. We need a world where the goal of business is not to ‘do less harm’, but instead to advance the ‘flourishing of human and other life’
—Antony Upward, Core Beliefs
Watch: Introduction to Antony Upward (story of self; professional intro)
Watch: Introduction to Flourishing Business Canvas (with mini case study)
Summary. Antony designs tools and conducts applied research to enable startups and established businesses to create business models that will flourish in the very different business conditions of the early 21st century - where financial viability depends on a win-win integration of social, environmental, and financial performance rather than considering it a win-lose trade off.
Deep Dive. To bring about his audacious vision for flourishing enterprises, Antony takes on the role of a 'pracademic' — a practicing academic. As a Sustainability Business Architect, he designs flourishing enterprises that do better in every way, by delivering social benefits, ecological regeneration, and economic success. Antony undertakes projects and publishes to support, enhance, and share his practice as an applied researcher.
Flourishing Enterprises are organizations of every kind that are fit for the future — the world that science tells us is emerging. Increasingly, we know we need organizations that are resilient, innovative, and aligned with stakeholders' values and needs. Flourishing enterprises contribute to realizing the UN Sustainable Development Goals. They do more than this by realizing sustainability-as-flourishing: sustaining the possibility for human and other life to flourish on this planet, for seven generations and beyond (John Ehrenfeld, MIT, 2000). These tri-impactful and tri-profitable enterprises co-generate social, ecological, and economic benefits with all their stakeholders. To do well, they aim to do good. When we adopt this as a common purpose, we excel because people are flourishing and nature is thriving (Cooperrider, 2010). Antony explored this vision and mission in his keynote speech at the 2nd New Business Models Conference in Graz, Austria (slides+notes). He explored these ideas in more depth in his talk 'What is a successful (sustainable) business?' at Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility, Copenhagen Business School (slides+notes)
Achieving these challenging but necessary outcomes at a scale and in timelines to make a difference to human well-being, given the growing existential threats facing humanity, requires a global community of practice and a wider movement for change. To create these, Antony has undertaken many interlinked activities.
Between 2000 and 2014, a diverse group of people coming from MIT Sloan School of Management (Dr. John Ehrenfeld) and Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Business (Dr. David Cooperrider, Dr. Chris Laszlo) started to conceive and convene the Flourishing Enterprise Movement. This movement recognizes the key role that human organizations of all kinds, for-profit, not-for-profit, and government, must play to realize sustainability-as-flourishing. This movement seeks to shift mindsets and behaviours of enterprise leaders at scale and quickly enough to impact human material well-being in the coming years and decades. Recently, Antony has suggested the movement's aim should be to shift the mindsets and behaviours of half of all business leaders and ninety percent of entrepreneurs worldwide by 2030, adopting sustainability-as-flourishing as the goal for their enterprises: socially beneficial, environmentally regenerative and financially viable.
In 2012, Antony was one of four co-founders of Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group (SSBMG), an important part of the Flourishing Enterprise Movement. Hosted by sLab at OCAD University, SSBMG is a community of senior practitioners, researchers, and graduate students working for innovation and knowledge mobilization. The group works on everything needed to enable small & medium enterprises to design, adopt, & gain benefits from strongly sustainable, future-fit, thriving, regenerative, resilient and flourishing business models.
Together with early members of the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group, Antony convened an international team the following year to bring to market the Flourishing Enterprise Innovation Toolkit, including the Flourishing Business Canvas. The Toolkit is based on his graduate research in which he designed and evaluated an ontology and canvas for strongly sustainable business models. His research is now published in several increasingly well-cited peer-reviewed articles in respected journals, and most recently, a book chapter, "Strategy Design for Flourishing: A Robust Method.” His research significantly extends the earlier profit-focused Business Model Ontology and the popular visual collaborative practitioner design tool, the Business Model Canvas. (See these posts for a research introduction for practitioners.)
The Flourishing Enterprise Innovation Toolkit provides business leaders and entrepreneurs with a comprehensive view of the key factors necessary to design innovative strategies with business models that are socially beneficial, environmentally regenerative and financially viable, i.e., fit-for-purpose in the rapidly changing 21st Century. The Toolkit includes an integrated, collaborative, visual design tool, the Flourishing Business Canvas — design principles and methods for designing better business strategies, together with patterns and case studies. Watch a short Introduction to the Flourishing Business Canvas with a mini-case study.
To be useful in practice, the toolkit needs to be applied in specific situations — different cultures, sectors, groups, issues, places and more. The project established a free First Explorers licensing program. More than 230 licensees worldwide are engaged in using the toolkit in their contexts and providing feedback. The pan-European climate change initiative, EIT-Climate-KIC, released a free-to-use online training course on Sustainable Business Modelling with the Flourishing Business Canvas as the featured tool. The course is a product of collaboration between five First Explorers, including EIT-Climate-KIC. Additionally, Antony is engaged with First Explorers initiatives to enable leaders to adopt the FEI toolkit with legacy methods and tools:
1. Lean for Flourishing Startups: “Innovating Innovation with the Startup Ecosystem". This startup business focuses on learning, content, methods and tools to help organizations encouraging entrepreneurs and their startups to benefit from the innovative flourishing approach. Based on its integrated Flourishing Entrepreneurship competency model, Lean for Flourishing works with entrepreneurial encouragers (accelerators, incubators, co-working spaces, and corporate innovation centres), enabling them to evolve the way they help entrepreneurs be innovative and achieve their goals. Lean for Flourishing, with other First Explorers, has developed the Lean for Flourishing Startup Method (L4FSM), one of the Methods in the Toolkit (a peer-reviewed paper and guidebook are in the works).
2. Enterprise Evolution "This is the new strategy process; this is strategy as a learning system; this is the Enterprise Evolution Program." This collaboration by the Four First Explorers covers strategic design services, frameworks, methods, and tools. Enterprise Evolution applies these to enable leaders of established small- and medium-sized enterprises, municipalities, public sector / not-for-profit organizations, to develop innovative strategies that leverage the social, environmental, economic and risk-reduction benefits. Enterprise Evolution, with other First Explorers, developed the Flourishing Enterprise Strategy Design Method (FESDM), one of the methods in the toolkit. This is now published as a chapter in the new text on strongly sustainable strategy development, Rethinking Strategic Management (2019).
Antony is commercializing these initiatives through Edward James Consulting Ltd., a flourishing enterprise design consultancy in Toronto, and has been partnering with sLab since April 2014. Edward James Consulting is a proud Certified Benefit Corporation®, one of more than 3,500 firms seeking to use business as a force for good.
This work builds on Antony's 30+ years’ experience in the design and implementation of management information systems for Apple, Bell Canada, CGI, AT&T, and others, focused on enterprise applications such as the ERP, CRM, SCM, SRM, and PLM solutions provided by SAP AG. Recently, Antony has undertaken business model work for many for-profit and not-for-profit enterprises and startups, and has worked with The Natural Step and B Lab on a new benchmark for truly sustainable business — the Future-fit Business Benchmark — another project of members of the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group.
From 1998–2008, Antony designed and delivered undergraduate, graduate and professional courses at the Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University (Toronto) focused on the business case, people, process and technology aspects of improving business processes. From 2014, he has developed and delivered hands-on courses on Flourishing Enterprise Design and Lean for Flourishing Entrepreneurship that have been delivered internationally. This has included programs delivered via the leading Norwegian Innovation Cluster GCE NODE, the pan-European Union climate change initiative EIT-Climate-KIC, via the Centre for Social Innovation's OCE Ontario Social Impact Voucher Program funded Flourishing Business Model Innovation Accelerator, and via the sLab's Ontario Centres of Excellence funded DesignJam program. In 2017, he delivered a graduate course "Total Sustainability Management" (SEP770) at McMaster University’s W. Booth School of Engineering Practice's Master’s program.
Antony is a graduate of York University's Faculty of Environmental Studies and Schulich School of Business, with a Master’s of Environmental Studies in Business Model Design and Sustainability and a Graduate Diploma in Business and the Environment.
Adjunct professor with OCAD U Graduate Studies. Visiting professor at Halmstad University School of Business, Engineering and Science, Department of Innovation Management, Halland Region, Sweden. Member of Halmstad U's Business Model Innovation research group, Center for Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Learning research (CIEL).
Funding, structure, and more practice are needed so that SSBMG’s members can bring about a positive global impact. The wider Flourishing Enterprise Movement needs planet-wide coordination, leadership and approach to undertake all the necessary applied research and practice development required. Antony is co-generating this evolution of the SSBMGroup and the wider movement to ensure its vision and potential is realized: shift the mind-sets and behaviours of roughly half of all business leaders, and ninety percent of all entrepreneurs by 2030 adopting sustainability-as-flourishing as the goal for their organization: socially beneficial, environmentally regenerative and financially viable.
In late 2016, along with other leaders of the Strongly Sustainable Business Model group, they imagined a distributed Flourishing Enterprise Institute, a planetary-wide network of nodes hosted by public and private institutions worldwide. Over time, they intend this networked institute to become a key leader of the necessary applied research, practice development and knowledge mobilization to realize and empower flourishing enterprises. The Institute is a key element of realizing the goals of the Flourishing Enterprise Movement at scale, quickly.
In March 2019, the Flourishing Enterprise Institute came to life. In partnership with Wilfrid Laurier University's Viessmann Centre for Engagement and Research in Sustainability (VERiS), secured initial funding from the Canadian Federal Academic funding agency, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council's (SSHRC), via a "Connection Grant". This was used to hold a Founding Forum for the institute in August 2019. Dr. David Cooperrider delivered a powerful keynote address, "Towards Full Spectrum Flourishing" (slides and other videos here), which was live-streamed, engaging the whole movement. Dr. Cooperrider's keynote provided the frame for the subsequent two days of discussions by invited SSBM Group members and leaders from the Flourishing Enterprise Movement from around the world interested in establishing nodes of the Flourishing Enterprise Institute.
Before, during and after the in-person workshop, the participants began to co-create the initial research agenda for the Flourishing Enterprise Institute, along with measurement, governance and collaboration frameworks, and a theory of change/logic model. These initial outputs are being used to secure funding to establish nodes of the Institute hosted by local institutions, creating the planetary-wide Institute, taking the Flourishing Enterprise Movement to the next stage of development. The Board of Directors of VERiS confirmed their intention to apply for funding, and as of mid-2020, this had been achieved, with VERiS hosting the first node of the Institute.
Over time, by executing the co-created research agenda, the Flourishing Enterprise Institute will, across all the nodes in its network, realize and empower Flourishing Enterprises and activists in the Flourishing Enterprise Movement worldwide by:
Antony is the Acting Director of Research and Practice at FEI. The Acting Director of FEI is SSBMG's Randy Sa'd.
In his practice over the last eight years, and from discussions with SSBMG members and others in the flourishing enterprise movement, Antony has recognized that the single biggest constraint on achieving flourishing enterprises at scale and quickly is citizen-leaders' ability to imagine them. After all, if you can't imagine something, such as what a flourishing enterprise in a flourishing society on a flourishing planet might look and feel like, it is unlikely you'll be able to design a strategy to help bring about that outcome.
One innovative approach to closing this imagination gap, and building the imaginative capacity of citizen-leaders, would be to supply them with speculative and science fiction stories set in worlds where people, environment and economy are flourishing, or where this journey is well under way. Critically, since at a certain level, we already have the systems-based trans-disciplinary scientifically credentialed knowledge, ethical and moral frameworks, and deep indigenous wisdoms of how to achieve flourishing, these stories must explicitly rely on these bodies of knowledge. Then, the citizen-leader readers of these stories would have their imaginations informed by exciting positive stories of the humanity in all its messiness, which are in practice feasible and desirable. Citizen-leaders' imaginations would then be filled with ideas for strategies for their enterprises and communities to move them decisively towards sustainability-as-flourishing. Note: no body of science or speculative fiction has attempted this formal, explicit link to our best available knowledge, ethics and wisdom of sustainability-as-flourishing. This means that any current speculative fiction story, only a small percentage of which are not 'doom and gloom stories', could lead readers to believe things are feasible and desirable, when we already know otherwise. In this case, the risk is that those citizen leader readers might imagine futures and develop strategies with their enterprises and communities that also are infeasible.
To tackle this gap in the artistic field of speculative and science fiction, Antony is acting provocateur for a new Flourishing Fiction Co-laboratory whose first project is running a global challenge for speculative and science fiction writers’ story submissions explicitly based on our best available knowledge, ethics and wisdom. The result will be stories shared with citizen leaders, growing their imaginative capacities, enabling them to design futures in which they, their enterprises and communities are experiencing sustainability-as-flourishing. He is seeking collaborators with links to organizations at the intersection of art, science, philosophy and wisdom, who also understand the urgent need to grow our citizen leaders' imaginative capacity, and have the resources to act decisively.
And finally, Antony believes that all this work focused on human organizations can only succeed at scale and in timeframes that avoid mass economic, social and human suffering that "business-as-usual" guarantees, if the Flourishing Enterprise Movement is part of a larger “big tent”. His observation, with others on the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group, and people in the wider Flourishing Enterprise Movement, is that if, in all our work focused on organizations, we want to strive for outcomes such as flourishing, resilience, low-carbon, future-fit, thrivability, regeneration, strong sustainability etc., we are much more likely to succeed at scale and quickly, if there is broad support from civil society at a global level for these ideas and goals. In short, an inclusive civil society movement is required; a movement that includes a strong focus on what replaces the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) when these expire in 2030.
Achieving such broad support for our shared goals beyond the UN SDGs has been a topic of recent face-to-face conversation between Antony, other members of the SSBMGroup, Dr. John Ehrenfeld from MIT (himself a member of the SSBMGroup), 200+ attendees at the October 2017 Relating Systems Thinking and Design conference (Oslo), Dr. Karl Henrik Robèrt, and other colleagues in Sweden, Norway, Denmark (Copenhagen Business School), the US (Case Western Weatherhead School of Business, Aim2Flourish Project), and across Canada. In addition, Scandinavian colleagues highlight a strong tradition of big picture thinking in national governments that could provide the ‘next step’, that is, the Brundtland Commission Report, led by then Norwegian Prime Minister. And as others have noted, Canada also has examples of making such gifts to the world, including its contribution to the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the establishment of UN Peacekeeping operations.
For the moment, to see if “the willing” can be provoked into action, Antony and others in the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group are tentatively referring to this as the “Movement for Flourishing” (see #Movement4Flourishing on Twitter). They are asking the question: can we co-create Flourishing Goals for humanity, for the UN to adopt to replace the UN SDGs when these expire in 2030? This aspirational label builds John Ehrenfeld’s thinking that inspires much of our work: the only the thing we can sustain scientifically, and the only thing we morally can defend as an ideal goal for our species, is sustaining the possibility for human and other life to flourish on this planet for seven generations and beyond. Antony is acting as a provocateur for this important part of the flourishing puzzle. He is searching for collaborators with appropriate links to the Canadian federal government, the United Nations and other interested parties, who share this vision for humanity and have the resources to act decisively.
Putting It All Together – Antony's Invitation To You, His World and Story So Far... A Visual Summary
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Please see Antony's page on academia.edu
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