DrNigel Forrest

I am co-convenor for the Business and Environment option of the Environmental Technology MSc. I arrived at Imperial in late 2022 after lecturing in sustainable business at the University of Northampton and holding post-doctoral positions involving research and teaching in sustainable business at Arizona State University School of Sustainability and Leuphana University, Germany.

My interests lie in understanding and furthering the role of SMEs, and business in general, in developing sustainable local economies and communities. I am particularly interested in questions of organisational form and sustainability, how businesses can (trans)form themselves through the adoption of radically sustainable business models and practices, the ways in which external actors and communities can support sustainable business, and in turn, how businesses can drive the sustainable transformation of communities.

I take a solutions-oriented approach to research (as opposed to problem-oriented) within a transformational sustainability problem-solving approach. This means identifying and understanding successful examples of sustainable enterprise and economies (business practices, business models, organisations, industry clusters, local economies) in their local context, and developing strategies to transfer and scale solutions.

My recent and ongoing areas of research include:

- cooperatives, employee-owned, community-based, and other alternative businesses

- sustainable food economies

- local grain economies

- sustainable entrepreneurship and sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems

Previous research, also within the solutions-oriented paradigm, has included:

- transformational urban water solutions

- community-based sustainability transition initiatives

- municipal sustainability programmes