Roveda Marco
Organization: LifeGate Group
Year Founded: 2000
Country: Italy
Website: www.lifegate.it
Geographic Area of Impact: Italy.
Model: Social Business
Focus: Communication / Media,Consumer Awareness,Energy,Environment,Trade.
Social Entrepreneur of the Year, Italy, 2007 The Innovation LifeGate is not only the Italian answer to the Kyoto protocol, with its carbon emission compensation programme, but it is a 360 approach to promote awareness and consciousness for a future in harmony environment. Founded in 2000 by Marco Roveda, a well-recognized bio-farming pioneer in Italy, LifeGate aims to contribute to a new way of doing business that places environment at the center. The most important message of LifeGate is that one can “do good” through profit as long as there is a close link between profits and ethics. LifeGate’s enterprises are based on three interrelated concepts, “People, Planet, Profits”. Background The exaggerated materialism of the past 30 years has undermined basic human values. Fortunately, many today recognize the importance of family and environment as fundamental underpinnings of all healthy and happy societies. Three decades ago, Marco Roveda came to the conclusion that the idea that “profit = happiness” was an illusion. LifeGate is the first business of its kind in Italy. It breaks with the past by proposing a new way to work and live and therefore becoming a unique model for the new economy, where business has a conscience and people are aware of their actions and how they affect others and the environment. Strategy In order change people’s mindsets and society as a whole, LifeGate operates a number of activities. Impatto Zero is a project that evaluates and reduced carbon emissions along with a number of universities and over 500 companies thus far. Impatto Zero compensates companies’ emissions with a reforestation program in Madagascar, in Italy in one of the country’s biggest natural parks (Parco del Ticino), and in Costa Rica in partnership with the Costa Rica Ministry of Environment and Energy. To date, 20 million square meters of new forest have been created through the program. Moreover, LifeGate helps partnering enterprises by evaluating and advising them over work and production processes from an ethical and environmental angle: LifeGate Ecopartners is an eco-strategy consulting enterprise that offers market analysis, brand positioning, and eco-marketing strategy. LifeGate Renewable Energy is the first Italian distributor of 100% clean energy to businesses. LifeGate Portal, a website with over 10,000 articles (health, environment, biological food, FairTrade, psychology) promotes social and environmental awareness. With 400 thousand visitors per month, LifeGate Portal also offers a free magazine, which is sent to the 100,000 LifeGate subscribers. LifeGate Radio with 420,000 listeners per week offers high quality music complemented by ethical messages or advice. No traditional advertising is allowed and sponsorships are accepted only from conscious and ethical companies. LifeGate Engineering offers a specialized consulting service in renewable energy systems for homes, private enterprises, and public services. It aims to obtain maximum energy efficiency, quality, and environmental sustainability at the construction and management level. LifeGate Ecojeans, produced in Italy using biological, uses European-grown cotton cultivated without the use of pesticides and chemical products. The carbon emitted during production of Ecojeans is compensated by reforestation activities, and 5% of the profits finances an awareness project. At LifeGate Café: all products available come from biological agriculture or from FairTrade markets. Additional services include catering, hosting concerts, and photography expositions. LifeGate is also working to put together an ethics committee to define the overall direction for the future of LifeGate. This complements the work of two other active committees – the Scientific Committee and the Administrative Committee. LifeGate opened up to private citizens in July 2008 thanks to an agreement with Edison, one of the major Italian utility companies. The Entrepreneur Born in Milan in 1951, Marco Roveda is an entrepreneur, a philosopher, and a visionary. To pursue his love of architecture, at the early age of 20, he founded a construction company and by age 22, he owned two such companies and managed 40 employees. By the age of 27, he and his wife Simona were a wealthy couple. But Roveda realized that material wealth would never bring him happiness. He sold one of the businesses, and eventually started a biodynamic farm (Fattoria Scaldasole), which became nationally renowned for its biological yogurt, bio-juices, and other products. He sold the other business to Plasmon, the Italian giant of baby food, and began contemplating a new concept of quality life, rather then a quality product, hoping to inspire others to rediscover non-materialistic values while producing goods and services that were compatible with those values. LifeGate is the manifestation of these efforts.
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