'Sustainability vital for business development'
by Rohana Jayala
Sustainability is very important in today's context of business.
Perhaps more important than running the government. The need of the hour
is to minimise environmental degradation which we hear of from the Port
City and Highway projects, Managing Director and CEO, N'able (Pvt) Ltd,
Peter de Almeida told the Business and Technology Conference 2015.
The conference was organised by the Asia Pacific Institute of
Information Technology (APIIT), Sri Lank, on the theme 'For a
sustainable future' at the APIIT premises recently.
Sustainability in its widest sense is creativity which could change
technology. Sustainability could be summed up as knowledge which could
be shared to change technology.
Creative thinking could in fact change technology. Multinationals
such as Kodak and Nokia suffered great setbacks as they failed to cater
to the rising needs in society. However, Apple identified what the
changing world needed and acted accordingly to become one of the mega
cartels. When American Airlines could earn only a profit of 31 cents per
passenger for a one-way flight, Google through its search engine did the
same business but had an income of US $ 50 billion during the same year.
This was a value capture of 21 percent.
Its tremendous success was due to creative thinking, he said.
Acting Director, Institute of Human Resource and Head of the
Department of Business and Economics, University of Colombo, Prof. H.D.
Karunaratne said, “We are aware that there are two main practices in
universal law - change and natural law. Natural law exerts influence on
the business sector. Sustainability is the key issue for an organisation."
"Economic resources are limited, but human needs and knowledge is
unlimited. Knowledge is the main factor in economics and business
discussions. In the contemporary world knowledge is one of the important
things and research comes next. The concept of sustainability is to
enhance and spread sustainable structures to improve the quality of
life," he said.
CEO, APIIT Lanka, Dr. Athula Pitigala-Arachchi. said, "This is a
forum for researchers in business and technology to present their
findings and inspire each other. Research is an integral part of
universities.
The discovery of knowledge (research) and the dissemination of
knowledge (teaching) are two sides of the same coin. APIIT has taken a
number of steps to encourage research. Annually, our faculty members
publish several conference and journal papers," he said. |