Welcome to the Leonardo Centre on Business for Society, a cross-faculty Centre of Excellence at Imperial College London. We bring together leading scholars, pioneering businesses and global institutions to rethink business from first principles and explore how it can help build a flourishing economy and society.

Humanity is confronting a set of profound and mutually reinforcing challenges: climate change, biodiversity loss, growing inequality, declining trust in institutions, technological disruption, and economic uncertainty.

These challenges are often addressed individually, each through its own policies, strategies and interventions. Yet they point to a deeper systemic question: our economies have become exceptionally good at creating wealth, but far less effective at translating that wealth into lasting wellbeing - for people, communities and the natural world.

The question is no longer simply whether change is needed, but how we make it happen at the speed and scale required across multiple systems.

Building a flourishing economy

At the Leonardo Centre, we believe the answer lies in building a Flourishing Economy: one in which economic success and societal progress reinforce one another, rather than compete.

Over the past decade, our research has explored a simple but powerful first question:

How can business, finance, leadership and markets work together to make positive impact a source of lasting value creation?

Our research points to a growing body of evidence: businesses that innovate in response to societal and environmental challenges can create competitive advantage; investors can accelerate transformation by rewarding meaningful action rather than compliance alone; and markets can be shaped so that positive outcomes become more visible, measurable and valuable.

But such transformation does not come from any single intervention.

It requires coordinated change across business behaviour, capital, markets, leadership and the wider systems in which organisations operate. So our research programme is designed around understanding those relationships — and identifying where change can create the greatest impact.

At the heart of this work lies a second question:

What do businesses actually do, and what effect do those actions have on business, societal and environmental outcomes?

We address this through a unique combination of data, evidence and behavioural insight, including the groundbreaking GOLDEN Sustainability Database and our innovative Business Impact Maturity framework. Together, they provide a foundation for understanding which corporate actions drive meaningful change — and how those actions can translate into lasting value.