By Andrew Nusca
Pharmaceutical and medical giant Johnson & Johnson announced on Thursday its “Healthy Future 2015” initiative, a sweeping citizenship and sustainability program that unites goals for its various businesses under a single, five-year roadmap.
The initiative covers seven key objectives and includes 15 specific goals.
The seven broad objectives are:
1.    Invest in R&D for neglected diseases and affordable access to medicine.
2.    Safeguard the planet.
3.    Partner with suppliers who embrace sustainability.
4.    Engage employees.
5.    Boost community wellness.
6.    Bolster outcome measurement in philanthropy.
7.    Increase transparency through external collaboration.
To do so, the company over the next five years will:
•    Sign one research partnership and three licensing agreements for neglected diseases.
•    Design business models to support affordable access to HIV and tuberculosis therapies in 90 developing nations.
•    Donate medicine for intestinal worms in 30+ countries where they’re prevalent.
•    Reduce the environmental impact of operations. (20% reduction in facility, fleet emissions; 10% reduction in water consumption, waste disposal)
•    Design products and packaging to be more sustainable.
•    Establish criteria for sustainable procurement in the supply chain. (Diversify partner portfolio; certify sustainable sources.)
•    Review/reinforce human rights policies for partners in “high-risk” nations.
•    Boost reporting and data collection for everything from the success of philanthropic programs to sustainability measures.
The company’s targets comfortably align with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, and logically follow previous “Healthy Planet 2010” and “Healthy People 2012” initiatives, which were less sweeping than this group and focused on sustainability and social responsibility, respectively.
In fact, this third “Healthy Future” chapter is in many ways the next step for both previous programs. The question is whether it’s aggressive enough: for example, it makes sense that J&J would be interested in further operational reductions but it’s hard to evaluate the goal without also looking at how the company is growing. Similarly, improving sustainability information uniformly across the company helps it compare apples to apples.
Still, it takes a lot of work for such a large company (with more than 100,000 employees worldwide) to affect change, and it’s no small task to get various fiefdoms within the company on the same page. Furthermore, any sustainability efforts within the pharmaceutical supply chain are going to gain traction first with the largest players in the market; J&J’s goals open the door wider for its peers to follow suit and collectively, as an industry, change.
None of this, of course, includes J&J’s efforts to rekindle pre-recession revenue levels, which took a dive in 2008 and continue to face headwinds from U.S. healthcare reform, consumer over-the-counter product recalls and generic competition in pharmaceuticals. As the company looks to address unmet needs in the market (and further diversify its revenue streams), it’s not a bad idea to control costs elsewhere in the company.
Andrew J. Nusca is an associate editor for ZDNet and SmartPlanet. As a journalist based in New York City, he has written for Popular Mechanics and Men’s Vogue and his byline has appeared in New York magazine, The Huffington Post, New York Daily News, Editor & Publisher, New York Press and many others. He also writes The Editorialiste, a media criticism blog.
He is a New York University graduate and former news editor and columnist of the Washington Square News. He is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has been named “Howard Kurtz, Jr.” by film critic John Lichman despite having no relation to him. He lives in his native Philadelphia with his wife, cat and Boston Terrier.
Follow him on Twitter.
(Source: www.smartplanet.com )