Our approach

We believe there is a need for a consultancy that has top-tier management consultancy skills, but that is also specialized on sustainability. These questions are so complex, and the business landscape is moving so fast, that we believe specialization is essential to be helpful to our clients. We put our clients’ interests first, focusing on value creation, but believe the conflict between shareholders’ and societies’ interests are much smaller than they used to be. We chose our name – Material Economics – because we believe that bringing the economic and business view to natural resource questions is important. 

How we help our clients
We work with both companies, the public sector, and philanthropy, but always within our area of expertise. In many cases, we also act as the principal of a project or an environmental theme, when we have identified a knowledge gap in an industry or on a specific question. Then we proactively gather a consortium of companies, regulators and sometimes philanthropies to address this gap. Our ambition is to become long-term thought-partners to our clients, as the complex issues we are dealing with often requires more than a one-off project. 

Our people
Our team consists of former consultants of top-tier management consultancies who are passionate about sustainability. We are located in Stockholm, Sweden but work internationally. 

We do many types of projects within our area of expertise. Below are a few archetypes. See also our Reference Projects and Publications. Feel free to get in touch to discuss collaboration opportunities.

Quantifying important natural resource debates

We believe that it is easier to move natural resource and environmental debates forward by quantifying them and describing them in economic terms. These projects are often done for consortiums of clients coming together to address a certain problem or natural resource. The projects are often public or semi-public, and the end products are typically a well-written report and a stakeholder mobilization plan. The ‘carbon cost curve’ projects and the circular economy projects (see ‘reference projects’) that our founder Per-Anders Enkvist did while working at McKinsey are examples of such projects, and in both cases moved each respective debate several steps forward.


Corporate strategy in a resource-constrained world

These projects take many shapes and forms, but the common denominator is often that a company or industry is running into natural resource constrains, which in turn causes reactions from markets, regulators, customers, and investors. Often, alternative technologies and business models are becoming available, but a possible transition raises difficult questions about cost competitiveness, cannibalization of old industrial models, customer reactions, and timing. We help our clients navigate this complex web, often through a combination of analytics, strategy discussions, 3rd party expertise, field visits, and analogies from other industries going through a similar transition. Investment decisions in long-term assets are often the ‘acid test’ of corporate strategy. We can help by bringing a second opinion and challenging internal ‘truths’.