Digital Sustainability Playbook

The purpose of this Playbook is to support organization on their sustainability transformation journey and in particular help with the creation and execution of a Digital Sustainability Strategy.

The Digital Sustainability Playbook itself is part of the Sustainable Supply Chain Framework and is referring to the other framework components as industry best practices to successfully define and deliver a digital sustainability strategy.

The MIT Alumni Energy, Environment and Sustainability Network and Platform Industrie 4.0, together with its partner ecosystems have created the Sustainable Supply Chain Framework as a tool and approach to accelerate the development of digital sustainability solutions in global supply chains, while improving the quality of those solution at the same time. Every day that a digital sustainability solution gets into production earlier or has a new functionality implemented earlier, has a positive impact on the sustainability performance of the organization. The acceleration also means less effort and the money saved that can be invested in other digital sustainability innovations.

This playbook is not supposed to be a cookbook, where you follow a specific recipe, but rather an approach that needs to be tailored to the specific organization, that wants to use digital technology on their sustainability transformation journey. Still it mentions all the required ingredients and is based on the vast amount for experience INOVIA Solutions has around strategy design and execution through enterprise architecture.

In the digital and sustainability sphere that are many approaches, guideline, standards, reference models, etc., but we found that while those help with specific aspect of the sustainability challenge, they do not address it holistically. The Sustainable Supply Chain Framework was not created to reinvent the wheel, but rather put what is already out there in a framework that can be used for strategy execution and solution development. Any potential gaps in the framework discovered by using it in practice, will be filled, as it is set-up as part of an open-source project that resides on a public GitHub page (https://github.com/mitsf09/sscf/wiki) and follows the Creative Commons 4.0 licensing model.

As of November 2025, the Sustainable Supply Chain Framework is governed by the Digital Sustainability Group of the MIT Alumni Energy, Environmental and Sustainability Network and is co-developed with in the MIT Innovation Network.

Digital Sustainability Playbook