A recurring virtual roundtable for IRI members navigating emerging sustainability risks, reporting demands, and strategy. One signup covers every session in the series. Sessions run about an hour and are held virtually. Sign up once and you’re registered for the full series — a calendar invitation is emailed for each session, and your calendar updates automatically if a time changes.
Session Topics
September 25, 2026 — Sustainability Theatre: Are We Measuring What Matters?
Sustainability teams face growing demands for certifications, questionnaires, audits, assessments, and reporting requests. While some of these efforts drive meaningful change, others can consume significant time and resources without delivering clear value. How do organizations determine which activities are worth pursuing? How do you distinguish between meaningful progress and “checking the box”? In this session, members will share experiences navigating certifications, reporting requirements, and stakeholder expectations while exploring ways to focus resources on activities that matter most.
October 23, 2026 — The New Materials Race
The transition toward more sustainable products and processes is creating a new frontier for materials innovation. Companies are under increasing pressure to find materials that can deliver the right combination of performance, cost, durability, safety, availability, and environmental impact while also navigating evolving regulations and resource constraints. At the same time, advances in AI, predictive analytics, materials science, and rapid prototyping are changing how quickly organizations can discover, evaluate, and develop new materials. This creates both an opportunity and a challenge for R&D organizations: how to leverage emerging technologies and capabilities to accelerate materials innovation while moving promising solutions from discovery to commercial scale.
November 18, 2026 — The Sustainability Innovation Ecosystem (Joint with Open Innovation Roundtable)
As sustainability challenges become more complex, organizations are increasingly looking beyond their own walls for the technologies, expertise, materials, capabilities, and resources needed to innovate. Partnerships with suppliers, customers, startups, universities, government organizations, and other external stakeholders can help companies share risk, access new capabilities, accelerate development, and bring solutions to market more quickly. At the same time, tougher market conditions and increasing resource constraints are making collaboration and open innovation more strategically important. This joint discussion with IRI’s Sustainability Roundtable will explore how organizations are building and managing innovation ecosystems to address sustainability challenges—and how these partnerships can create new opportunities for technology transfer, business model innovation, and competitive advantage.
