We consider the SDGs an important initiative for realizing a sustainable society and improving people's quality of life through solving global social and environmental issues. We have significantly contributed to achieving the SDGs through our Social Innovation Business, which also serves as a source of sustainable growth for us.
Accordingly, through the provision of innovative solutions and products in our Social Innovation Business, we will strive to create social, environmental, and economic value as part of our management strategy. We will also strive to reduce negative social and environmental impacts resulting from our business and seek a deeper understanding of business risks arising from social and environmental changes to ensure greater robustness against them.
In fiscal 2017 Executive Sustainability Committee meetings chaired by President and CEO Toshiaki Higashihara, the committee members considered the 17 SDGs, and the opportunities and risks they represented, and identified 11 Goals to the achievement of which Hitachi can make a particularly significant contribution: 5 Goals where we can make significant impact through our key business strategies, and 6 additional Goals that we must contribute to through our entire corporate activities. We view the latter 6 Goals as relevant to our entire business and management strategies, making an impact on corporate sustainability.
Because we are active in a broad range of business fields, we believe we can contribute extensively to the achievement of the SDGs other than the 11 Goals identified. Understanding that all SDGs are mutually related, we will endeavor to contribute to the achievement of all 17 SDGs both directly and indirectly.
Since its founding, Hitachi has responded to social challenges by placing its Corporate Credo of contributing to society through the development of superior, original technologies and products at the center of its business. In recent years, we have promoted our Social Innovation Business in order to contribute to improving people's quality of life and realizing a sustainable society. We have implemented sustainable management, placing sustainability at the center of our business strategy and—in our 2021 Mid-term Management Plan announced in May 2019 and ending in fiscal 2021—setting ourselves the goal of contributing to the realization of a sustainable world as a global leader of Social Innovation Business. We strive to simultaneously increase social, environmental, and economic value, as well as enhance our customers' corporate value and the peoples' quality of life.
With our 2021 Mid-term Management Plan, we have advanced to a new stage, identifying five sectors where we can increase social, environmental, and economic value for our customers simultaneously: mobility, smart life, industry, energy, and IT. In order to increase the three kinds of value simultaneously, we will expand our Social Innovation Business through collaborative creation with our partners around the world by providing Lumada, a solution that accelerates digital innovation, as a cyber-physical system allowing the cyber and physical spaces to interact.
Based on these ideas, we continue to pursue the 2021 Mid-term Management Plan, further merging sustainability and business to contribute to the resolution of social issues through initiatives like Society 5.0 and Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs).
What is Lumada?
Lumada is a solution/service/technology that uses Hitachi's advanced digital technology to create value from customer data and accelerate digital innovation.
Developing a sustainable society as defined by the SDGs will lead to sustainable growth for Hitachi, too. We believe that we are providing value not only to the companies and consumers that are our direct customers but also to society more broadly. This is the essence of our Social Innovation Business. The products and services that we provide are all closely linked to social sustainability, and we aim to establish a global position as a business-to-society (B2S) company through our efforts to help achieve the SDGs.
In fiscal 2017, we officially launched strategic initiatives for achieving the SDGs. In phase 1, as part of our initiatives to help deepen understanding across the Hitachi Group of sustainability and the SDGs, sustainability workshops were held individually for four business units: Water, Energy Solutions, Healthcare, and Railway Systems. Sustainability newsletters were also issued in an effort to promote understanding and awareness of our SDG initiatives. In phase 2, our Sustainability Promotion Division worked with the planning divisions of business units and key Group companies to clarify how each could contribute to the achievement of the SDGs through their key businesses and create business opportunities from the SDGs.
In phase 3, starting in fiscal 2018, Hitachi started seeking new business opportunities emerging from social challenges addressed by the SDGs. Specifically, we clarified how each business unit and key Group company should link their Social Innovation Business to the SDGs and set quantitative KPIs, wherever possible, for the social and environmental value they created to help visualize improvements.
In fiscal 2019, we launched an initiative exploring ways to build a framework for assessing social and environmental impacts brought about by business activities, in order to make our efforts to create social and environmental value closely linked to the SDGs more appealing to our customers and society in a concrete manner. Moving forward, we will develop an impact assessment approach with reference to key businesses outlined in the 2021 Mid-term Management Plan, thereby establishing an impact evaluation framework for social and environmental value that can be used across the entire Group.
This approach will enable us to offer more sustainable business options to our customers based on consideration of the positive and negative social and environmental impacts of our business activities. In this way, we will realize the three kinds of value outlined in the 2021 Mid-term Management Plan.
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