Overview
The Ivey Centre for Building Sustainable Value (BSV) is Ivey Business School’s Centre of excellence in sustainability. Founded in 2002, BSV is globally recognized for its leadership in research and teaching that contribute to building a sustainable and prosperous world.
The Centre plays a key role in advancing Ivey’s strategic priorities by deepening the School’s societal impact and connecting academic excellence with real-world challenges. Through research, education, and outreach, BSV brings Ivey’s purpose—to inspire leaders for a sustainable and prosperous world—to life.
BSV’s vision is to advance a regenerative economy that bridges prosperity and sustainability. Its mission is to strengthen the capacity of change-seekers across sectors to build thriving communities, co-creating effective transition pathways to a regenerative future.
This mission begins with transforming Canada’s agri-food system. While globally recognized for its efficiency, the current system also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, ecosystem degradation, and food waste, all while millions face food insecurity. Canada has the potential to lead the way in building a system that ensures universal access to affordable, nutritious food, while operating within the planet’s ecological boundaries. But this transformation requires systemic change: Learn more about how we are transforming agri-food and our Lighthouse Initiatives.
Our work in agri-food is just one part of a broader vision: a regenerative economy where prosperity and sustainability are no longer at odds.
The Centre also drives change through four impact labs focused on critical areas for sustainable development: the Circular Economy Lab, Net Zero Lab, Sustainable Finance Lab, and Innovation North. These labs connect rigorous research with meaningful action.
On the global stage, BSV hosts the Network for Business Sustainability (NBS), a network of researchers, managers, and students advancing sustainable business practices. NBS also convenes a global community of business school sustainability centres to drive sustainability research and education forward.
Vision, Mission & Strategy Overview
In the documents below, we elaborate on the key elements of our Centre's strategy, including our Lighthouse Initiatives, that support our vision of advancing a regenerative economy that bridges prosperity and sustainability, and our mission to strengthen the capacity of change-seekers across sectors to build thriving communities, co-creating effective transition pathways to a regenerative future.
Detailed strategy document coming soon
How do we create impact?
Our Distinctive Approach:
- Focusing on the catalytic role of outlier change-makers to disrupt the status quo and drive transformational shifts in complex systems.
- Accelerating and scaling the impact of change-makers through an outcome-focused community model of change.
Actioning change through our new "Lighthouse Initiatives"
The BSV Centre is addressing key barriers to systemic change — poor collaboration, concentrated power, and a narrow efficiency mindset — through our new impact-driven Lighthouse Initiatives:
Transforming systems through cutting-edge research
The BSV Centre focuses on four impact labs that are critical to transforming business and society toward sustainable development:
Empowering the leaders of the future
Ivey’s students have immense passion and motivation. They believe that business can be a force for good and they want to help move the sustainability needle. The BSV Centre is harnessing and growing the enthusiasm of these future business leaders so that they can apply their passions in environmentally, socially, and economically beneficial ways.
Find out more about our sustainability-focused student programs.
Global influence
Businesses need access to rigorous, relevant research to support their decisions and actions, and researchers need to understand real-world business challenges to ask relevant questions. The BSV Centre hosts the Network for Business Sustainability (NBS), a growing global network of over 35,000 researchers, managers and students committed to advancing sustainable business.
NBS also convenes a community of 190 business school sustainability centres worldwide, working together to push the research agenda and integrate sustainability into business research and teaching.
Stay in touch
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