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The Data Lab is the analytical backbone of the Leonardo Centre. It transforms dispersed corporate sustainability disclosures into structured, decision-relevant evidence and supports all Leonardo pathways with robust data, insights and tools.

Its foundation is the GOLDEN dataset — one of the world’s largest longitudinal datasets of reported corporate sustainability initiatives — offering a rare level of granularity at the initiative level, rather than only through broad commitments, ratings or aggregate disclosures.

• 2.7M+ sustainability initiatives
• 90,000 corporate sustainability reports
• 18,000 companies
• 80+ countries
• 30 years of reporting history

The Data Lab supports Leonardo’s thematic labs by converting reported sustainability signals into rigorous datasets that underpin our research, publications and data visualisation tools.

The Lab is expanding horizontally, by integrating additional sources — including social, trade and other contextual data — and vertically by further extracting antecedents, impact unlocked and topic-specific content. It aims to lead the global corporate sustainability behavior analysis.

The Leadership Lab is the Leonardo Centre’s unit focused on individual impact maturity. It develops the mindsets, capabilities and behaviours needed for leaders to navigate complexity, act with responsibility, and create long-term systemic value.

The Lab combines leadership development with experimentation. Its goal is not only to inspire a new generation of leaders — what the Centre has called "righteous business warriors" — but also to identify the most effective interventions for building regenerative mindsets and translating them into action.

• 1,500+ learners engaged through executive education and related programmes 
• Financial Times Best Responsible Leadership Programme Award (2023)
• 50+ contributing experts across neuroscience, organisational behaviour, sustainability, health and climate science

The Leadership Lab equips individuals to: navigate complexity with greater clarity and resilience, mobilise networks and influence others, make decisions anchored in long-term systemic value and translate purpose into leadership behaviour. It does this through a combination of executive education, reflective practice, experimental learning and interdisciplinary research.

The Lab's key external partners have included: HSBC – Corporate and Institutional Banking, ImperiaInstitute for Extended Learning and Emeritus (online course partner).

The Leadership Lab is working to make its offering more scalable through asynchronous executive education, while investing in innovative, data-driven teaching tools — including business cases, simulations and other experimental learning formats. A further priority is embedding research more directly into participants’ organisations and alumni ecosystems, so that mindset development can be studied not only as an individual shift, but as a catalyst for wider organisational and system change.

The Impact Finance Lab explores how finance can move beyond allocating capital to become an active driver of systemic change. Its work focuses on how financial institutions can recognise, reward and scale business behaviours that generate stronger sustainability outcomes and long-term value.

The Lab combines financial analysis with behavioural sustainability research. Building on the GOLDEN dataset and the Leonardo Centre's wider research platform, it is developing a new generation of behaviour-based indicators designed to go beyond the limitations of conventional ESG ratings and make sustainability more decision-relevant for capital markets.

The Lab's strongest evidence to date comes from the report A Behavioural Revolution: Sustainability actions that create alpha, which shows that companies in the top quartile for transformation actions delivered an average +2.52% annual alpha, or risk-adjusted excess returns.

The Impact Finance Lab helps translate sustainability into financial relevance by:

• connecting corporate behaviour to measurable performance signals
• developing more decision-relevant indicators for investors and markets
• engaging asset owners and asset managers on the design of funds based on sustainability behaviours
• linking Leonardo's research to the design of new market and investment tools.

The Lab has developed relationships across finance, data, academia, and market infrastructure, including: Nikkei, World Climate Foundation, LSEG, Nasdaq and HSBC: and academic partners including Wharton, MIT, Politecnico di Milano and HEC.

The next phase of the Lab’s work will focus on scaling the financial applications of Leonardo’s research through strategic partnerships with asset owners, asset managers and private equity. The objective is to translate research insights into investable solutions – indices, new funds and financial instruments that can direct capital toward more transformative forms of business behaviour.

The Chemicals Decarbonisation Lab designs, tests and scales market-based mechanisms for decarbonising the chemical sector. It works with Shell, the Centre for Green Market Action, Mission Possible Partnership, the Rocky Mountain Institute, Boston Consulting Group, the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification body, SCS Standards and the University of Minnesota to develop applied research, industry guidance and certification approaches for chemical supply chains. Across º£½ÇÉçÇø, the Lab collaborates with the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Centre for Environmental Policy, the Sargent Centre for Process Systems Engineering and Data Science º£½ÇÉçÇø.

The Chemical Lab has developed one of Leonardo's most advanced models for impact monetisation through its work on chemical decarbonisation. Its core contribution is a sector-specific solution for operationalising market-based insetting through Environmental Attribute Certificates (EACs). Using a Book & Claim Chain of Custody model, it makes Scope 3 reductions visible, verifiable and investible. At full maturity, the model could achieve the following within the petrochemical value chain:

• abate 200+ MtCOâ‚‚e annually 
• reach around USD 20 billion per year in market value 
• operate with <0.3% cost impact on product pricing, with 1–3% premium potential 

The Chemical Lab's work on petrochemical value chains also provides a critical foundation for cross-sector collaboration particularly with fashion, where chemical inputs, synthetic materials and end-of-life toxicity create shared challenges around consumer safety and healthy circularity.

Our Fashion Lab works with Politecnico di Milano and fashion industry partners to redesign supply chains for transparency, circularity and reduced overproduction. Its three active projects are SAFEGUARD, which focuses on wellbeing and transparency in global supply chains; PLASTICS RECODE, which develops low-carbon plastics and decarbonisation tools; and REWIRE, which uses AI-enabled demand forecasting and circular production design in collaboration with brands including Roberto Cavalli. The Lab draws on expertise from º£½ÇÉçÇø's Dyson School of Design Engineering.

The Fashion Lab addresses one of the world's most structurally complex industries — where sustainability challenges span materials, production, labour and waste, and where chemical inputs, synthetic fibres and persistent substances, such as PFAs and microplastics, create shared frontiers with the chemical sector.

A key achievement is a university-wide initiative connecting researchers across materials science, public health, engineering and social science into a coherent, cross-disciplinary portfolio. This is complemented by a report mapping º£½ÇÉçÇø's research against five priority themes, linking frontier science to concrete industry transition needs.

The Lab's core focus is healthy circularity — designing materials and systems that are safe for workers, consumers, and ecosystems across the full product lifecycle. By identifying the leverage points at which sustainability becomes economically advantageous, it positions fashion as a powerful arena for impact monetisation and market creation, where improvements in health outcomes, material safety and labour standards can be translated into investable market signals.

Together, the Sector Labs help Leonardo:

• identify where sector-specific transformation is blocked
• convene actors across value chains
• design shared roadmaps and incentive structures
• link verified outcomes to economic value
• create the foundations for Markets for Impact in real industries

The next phase of work focuses on building coalitions capable of tackling selected challenges through measurable and tradable impact. This means working with international institutions and other conveners to align actors, develop governance and measurement systems, and move from pilots to scalable mechanisms — with particular attention to hard-to-abate sectors.

The Country Lab focuses on systemic innovation and transition at scale. Its role is to enable business leaders and policymakers to build regenerative models and thriving ecosystems by bringing together business, finance, policy and civil society to design context-specific strategies and pathways that mobilise investment and change for regional transformation.

The Country Lab approaches regenerative innovation and transition as a systemic challenge. It creates models and practices that enable diverse actors, institutions, capabilities and investment to converge into transformative action.

A central contribution of the Lab has been the design of the Private Sector Transition (PST) programme — a systemic intervention model created to support the shift toward more regenerative economies.

The PST bridged high-level visions and ambitions for transition with real-world action and implementation. It combines capability development, co-creation, and change implementation to help local ecosystems shift in new trajectories. PST leverages existing systems, relationships and resources in ways that can enable sustained transformation.

The Country Lab enables Leonardo to translate regenerative ambition into regional transition models and transformative action by aligning public and private actors around shared goals, and connect other labs to support change from individuals to companies to systems.

The Lab's work has included collaboration with: the World Bank, the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Uzbekistan, the Ministry of Agriculture of Uzbekistan and Green University (Uzbekistan).

The Country Lab continues to support actors in configuring new models for change that combine innovation, education and research. Its ambition is to help demonstrate that regenerative transition is not just talk, but can be real action at scale.