The subject of the Harvard Business Review (Haanaes, K., D. Michael, J. Jurgens,
S. Rangan. 2013. Making sustainability profitable. Harvard Business Review. Vol. 91, Issue 3, Page 110—114.) is the sustainability in emerging market businesses.
The main aim of the article is to show how companies in emerging markets can gain advantages against big western companies in changing their methods to sustainable methods and how they can make sustainability profitable.

The authors are analysing a research from the Boston Consulting Group, which identified “companies with the most effective sustainability practise in the developing world” (p.111). The research includes 1000 companies with different sizes, and which are from a wide range of industry areas. The organisations are from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and the South Pacific. The authors came up with the idea, that the above mentioned companies had to use one or more of three special approaches to make their environmental effort financial profitable. Some looked far into the future and invested initially in more-expensive sustainable operations, which led later to lower costs and higher yields. Others began with small changes to gain cost savings, which they used for investments in more-innovative technologies, which made their production more efficient. And others put their sustainability efforts on their costumers and supplies to gain from their buying-power.

To make sustainability profitable the authors say, that a company should use at least one of the three approaches.

The first approach is to make a more-expensive investment in the beginning to change to sustainable production, which will lowering costs “down the road”(p.111). This can maybe be difficult to recognize for companies in the beginning but they have to “take a leap of faith” (p.111). The authors are giving two examples