Corporate responsibility materiality assessment plays a central role in sustainability management and reporting. It is used to identify the most important (material) issues for a company and its stakeholders.

However, one problem is the limited insightful value of materiality analyzes. Especially with new topics, so-called “emerging topics”, companies find that it is difficult to clarify business relevance beyond compliance and thus to create pressure to act.

This is where the optimizations from Novartis come in: Two changes are particularly noteworthy: On the one hand, the strengthening of the stakeholder approach and the collection of qualitative data. On the other hand, it is about the scenario analysis: Scenario analysis turned out to be the right way to look at issues from various perspectives together with internal stakeholders from various specialist departments. The resulting discussions brought important insights for everyone involved. One challenge now is to have these discussions regularly so that the conclusions can also be incorporated into the strategies of the specialist departments.