Sustainable Enterprise Lab

The Sustainable Enterprise Lab is a research hub that exists to showcase how work, skills and business are evolving for a new economy as fossil fuel dependence recedes. Housed in the Bristol Digital Futures Institute at The Sheds, Temple Quarter, it provides partnership opportunities, innovation support and thought leadership for companies and organisations seeking sustainability strategy.

Despite public commitments to achieve “net zero,” the sustainable enterprise is currently a fiction. Carbon emissions continue to rise and overheat the planet. Organisations lack credible and accessible tools to reduce their environmental impacts and advance regenerative principles in business planning.  

The UK South West is home to industries that need to lead the energy transition at pace: aerospace and advanced engineering, creative and media production, health and education, and a fast-growing digital and AI sector. Each faces mounting pressure to account for the full ecological cost of what gets made, shipped, and used, while knowing that existing customer behaviour may not guide the way forward.  

The Sustainable Enterprise Lab exists to navigate these shifts. Through ethnographic, people-centred research, collaboration with industry and nonprofit partners, and strategic foresight services, we bring rigour and perspective to long-term strategy. Our work helps organisations identify the changing values, resource constraints, cultural expectations and policy context reshaping the future and technology’s role in building it.

Initial areas of research and investment include:  

  • Defining standards for tracking and reducing carbon emissions in digital estates
    The Sheds at Temple Quarter is our test bed for producing carbon inventory and efficiencies for digital production, developing new sustainability services

  • Incubating business model innovation for a circular digital economy Normalizing hardware repair and reuse, promoting “reuser experience”

  • Innovative user research for carbon conscious consumption
    Applied anthropology for sustainable workplace and household activities
     
  • Ecocentric AI: Deploying technology for nature appreciation and protection  
    Summer school programs; community partnerships  

  • Historical and community-facing studies of industrial legacies and high-tech clusters
    Guidance on environmental stewardship, land use, water, air quality  

  • Supporting non-profits sharing the mission of low carbon transitions, in cash and in kind
    (Bristol Repair Coalition, GreenTech South West, Knowle West Media Centre, Green Web Foundation, Sustainable Games Alliance) 

The Lab offers a range of opportunities to partner. Sponsors can choose to support research through funding a proportion of academic staff time, dedicated research fellows/associates, PhD students, or a combination. In-kind donations (e.g. expertise, ethnographic research access, datasets, new technology) are also welcome. 

An illustrative list of further functions provided by the Lab includes: 

  • Consulting and strategic advisor roles for new product directions and categories

  • User research and day in the life scenarios for sustainability outcomes  

  • Sustainability principles and policies for organizations with growing AI workloads  

  • Community engagement initiatives for carbon reduction goals  

  • Internship and mentoring opportunities for early career researchers 

  • Policy and standards advice for sustainable hardware and software

  • Commissioned reports and whitepapers on emerging sustainability standards 

  • Published articles and thought leadership

  • Keynote speaking and public advocacy  

Lead: Professor Melissa Gregg, Professor of Digital Futures, BDFI / Business School 

Melissa Gregg is Professor of Digital Futures at the University of Bristol, jointly appointed at the Bristol Digital Futures Institute and the Business School. An internationally recognized scholar and former Senior Principal Engineer at Intel, her unique career bridges academic research, technology industry leadership, and sustainability strategy. 

At Intel, Gregg led the first industry collaboration of its kind in social science and engineering across five US universities, before directing User Experience for multiple platform generations. She established Intel’s first sustainability product team for the CTO and has executive training in Sustainability Leadership from Harvard University. Recent consulting experience includes Meta, Lenovo and ASML.  

Gregg is the author of six books and over 60 scholarly articles on workplace culture, corporate sustainability, and the social dimensions of digital technology. Her regular column Computing Ecologies in ACM Interactions documents emerging directions in digital technology, design and environmental responsibility. 

Industry 

  • Lisa Rivalin (Meta) 
  • Amber Huffman (Google) 
  • Sylvia Downing (Azimuth AI) 
  • Taimur Burki (SEMI) 
  • Sarah Kim (eReuse Services) 

Academia  

  • Diego Bermudez (Exeter) 
  • Udit Gupta (Cornell Tech) 
  • Josh Lepawsky (Memorial) 
  • Yolande Strengers (Monash) 
  • Adrian Woolard (Royal Holloway)