This past weekend, we attended the 2007 Net Impact Conference at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN to discuss and discover what the next generation of MBA students will do to make our world more sustainable.

This year’s conference, the world’s largest ever gathering of socially responsible graduate business students and young professionals, attested to the dramatically increased interest among leading corporations in corporate social responsibility with more than 30 major organizations, an unprecedented number for this fast-growing event, pledging their support and sponsorship for the conference. We saw flagship logos from the likes of Dow, Dupont, Starbucks, McDonalds and Microsoft purposefully displayed throughout the conference, and Dow even sent their Chairman & CEO, Chad Holliday, down to keynote the conference. There was no mistaking that the era of CSR has arrived in full force, and it’s no surprise considering the following stats:

• 79% of MBA’s indicated they would seek employment that is socially responsible in the course of their careers, and 59% said they would do so immediately following business school.
• 89% said business professionals should take social and environmental impacts into account when making business decisions.
• 81% agreed with a statement that businesses should work toward the betterment of society, although only 18% believed most corporations are currently working toward that goal.

We found the opening remarks by Patagonia’s founder Yvon Chouinard quite refreshing in a creatively pessimistic way. Interviewed by Andy Savitz, author of The Triple Bottom Line, Yvon pulled no punches in his brutally realistic outlook of the status quo, indicating with abrupt hand gestures the dissonance between projected population growth on the one hand, and non-renewable natural resources and ecosystem stability on the other.

Along with an overabundance of fantastic panels, covering everything from The International Business Challenge: Balancing your company’s identity with local culture to Making Waves: How social entrepreneurs bring about change, egg’s own Marty McDonald was a featured speaker on the subject of Green Branding: Engaging the Consumer, along with Nick Aster of TreeHugger.com, Perry Goldschein of SRB Marketing, Inc. and Brian LaValle of EcoMedia.

Happy takeaways: the conference’s use of the old-school Hatch Show Print shop for all of their design and printing, and a few memorable foodie visits including the very well-known Loveless Cafe, and the considerably less well-known Smokin’ Ed’s Barbecue.