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LVMH to support the training of students and their awareness of environmental issues, while feeding its creativity and capacity for innovation. One of the most emblematic partnerships is the one forged in Great Britain with Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, an internationally renowned London institution for the education it provides in art and design. The two partners, which have col- laborated for many years, strengthened their ties in 2017 by launching a new program entitled Sustainability & Innovation in Luxury | Fostering Creativity . This program co-developed by the two partners is based on their shared desire to meet the multiple challenges facing the luxury goods industry and has a three-fold ambition: to promote creativity, encourage young talent, and identify breakthrough solutions to support sustainable development and innovation in the sector. The pro- gram covers several courses of study at the school, including fashion, architecture and jewelry. From the outset, it has proven a real melting pot for the research and development of new methods for design and new materials. For example, a Green Trail was organized to recognize the five greenest projects developed by students across all areas of study. In addition, 15 employees of LVMH, primarily architects working for Benefit, Berluti, Bvlgari, Celine, Le Bon Marché, Louis Vuitton and Parfums Christian Dior, and 25 students and 5 members of the teaching staff from Central Saint Martins combined their talents within the framework of the Green Concept Store. They worked in teams for nearly eight months to develop a green boutique concept in line with the DNA of the Houses which meets their quality requirements. Beyond the inter- est in the winning project, the competition was an opportunity to share and highlight particularly innova tive ideas, such as the use of mushrooms to create a highly renewable material for the fabrication of furnishings, or the purification of ambient air through a circuit of algae. Louis Vuitton also conducted a project with the students, who had to propose new product concepts for accesso r ies, leather goods and customer gifts by integrating the concept of circular creativity. Finally, the Green Trail was an opportunity, in June 2018, to highlight, from among all the end-of-year projects developed by the Central Saint Martins students, the projects and products with the most successful envi ronmental approach. Five winners were selected by a jury from among the approximately one hundred candidates.
Several academic partnerships established within the Group were forged at the initiative of the Houses. In France, for example, Guerlain supports
the Institut d Administration des Entreprises Gustave Eiffel, one of the best university management schools, and sponsors its Master s program in Innovation, Design and Luxury Goods. The common thread for this sponsorship was sustainable development and the students were offered a case study, which consisted of creating the new Guerlain eco-designed product. In Poland, Belvedere has supported training in environmental themes for students at the university of Łódź since 2008. In Italy, Bvlgari is a longstanding partner of the Management Institute of the Sant Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, a prestigious university institute in the field of applied sciences. Since 2006, the House has financed a Master s program in: Management and Control of the Environment: the Circular Economy and Efficient Use of Resources . In 2018, the program included a collaborative educational project composed of three students, their academic instructor and experts from Bvlgari to work on a problem: the deployment of sustainable practices in the production process of Bvlgari Accessories in Florence. The project resulted in the development of an action plan designed to reduce the volume of waste and CO2 emissions through the supply chain, with the emphasis placed on two key items to reduce environmental impacts: shipping and packaging.
Support fundamental research In addition to expanding knowledge, LVMH wants to contribute to the transfer of knowledge from the scientific sphere to business and civil society. Convinced that scientific knowledge can improve the integration of the need to preserve natural resources in corporate strategies, the Group relies in particular on research into natural capital. In 2018, LVMH went one step further by financing the creation of a Chair of Environmental Accounting in partnership with AgroParisTech (the Paris Institute of Technology for Life, Food and Environmental Sciences) and the ParisTech Foundation. This Chair unites players from various backgrounds academics, professionals, institutions, etc. for development, promotion and experimentation in environmental accounting with strong sustainability. In contrast to so-called weak sustainability, this concept is based on the complementary features of technical, human and natural capital. It therefore does not allow interchangeability among these three types of capital. With this Chair, the general objective is to develop a sustainable socio-economic system that respects the environment and includes all players concerned, including economic players.