AI & Technology

21st Century Fox and the National Geographic Society have completed the transaction to form National Geographic Partners, a new media company combining the National Geographic television channels with the remainder of the Society's commercial assets, including National Geographic magazine, National Geographic Studios, and more. The new company will have a shared governance structure, and both entities will have equal representation on the board of directors. On November 16, the company announced the appointment of its senior leadership team.

UK start-ups are demonstrating the greatest survival rates in three years, according to the Barclays and Business Growth Fund (BGF) Entrepreneurs Index, a bi-annual series tracking the UK entrepreneurial lifecycle.

AccountAbility has released the final version of the AA1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard (AA1000SES) 2015. Part of the AA1000 Series of Standards, the AA1000SES (2015) provides practical guidance on how to assess, design, implement and communicate effective stakeholder engagement.

Food waste continues to be a global challenge despite industry-wide efforts to reduce it. Every year, about 80 billion pounds of food are discarded in the U.S. The EPA issued a telling statement about the situation in September when it said, “Let us feed people, not landfills.”

I recently attended the PRI in Person conference on the Principles for Responsible Investment held in London last September and came away quite impressed. While I came away with plenty of new information to digest, and more than a bit overwhelmed, the reoccurring theme that stood out was not the title of any specific session, it was the number of women in attendance at the conference — 40 percent of the delegates and 35 percent of the speakers were females.

Companies are actively pursuing alternative approaches to the linear take-make-waste model that decouple economic growth from resource constraints—such as the circular economy.