Integrated reporting at Novo Nordisk

In 1994, the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk became one of the first companies in the world to produce an environmental report. Since then, the company has continued to expand and develop its voluntary disclosures and has gained a reputation as a leader in the area of sustainability reporting. Although Novo Nordisk has not yet adopted the Connected Reporting Framework (CRF), it has spent the last five years developing its own approach, which it calls ‘integrated reporting’ and which seeks to measure social, environmental and financial performance within a single comprehensive document. Underpinning this approach, and aligned closely with the recommendations of the CRF, is Novo Nordisk’s bold aim to ‘fully integrate’ sustainability within business strategy. The pursuit of what the company calls full integration is not limited to the development of new disclosure practices: instead, Novo Nordisk has developed a ‘way of management’ that encompasses corporate governance, employee culture, specific management tools and rigorous performance measurement methods. In this way, sustainability reporting may be viewed as just one element of a broader approach that may offer the potential to further strengthen and ‘embed’ a sustainability mindset within the organization. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the background and development of integrated reporting at Novo Nordisk and to explore the extent to which the company’s goal of full integration and its use of reporting and other control systems have succeeded in making sustainability an embedded feature of the organization.