ABOUT NEMETAN
A clear space in a complicated field
Nemetan is pioneering a systematic, evidence-based approach to Sustainability Opportunity Discovery: helping organisations see what their disclosures really reveal, and turn that clarity into value.
THE NAME
Where “Nemetan” comes from
Nemetan takes its name from the nemeton, a defined, ordered space set apart at the heart of the ancient Celtic world. It was a space made on purpose: a place where a community's elders and law-keepers gathered to weigh difficult matters, settle disputes and see clearly before they acted. Less a place of ritual than a place of counsel and sound judgement. You went there to think straight.
Sustainability disclosure has become genuinely hard to see through. TCFD, TNFD, CSRD, double materiality, an ever-growing weight of metrics and rules. Much of what matters, both the hidden Risk and the unrealised Opportunity, gets lost in the noise.
Nemetan is that clear space. We help you step back from the complexity, see what your own disclosures and your competitors' actually reveal, and turn that clarity into value.
WHY WE EXIST
Sustainability as ambition, not defence
Double materiality asks every company to weigh its Impacts, Risks and Opportunities alike. Yet the tools, the profession and the habits of sustainability reporting have spent a decade building rigour around Risk, and almost none around Opportunity. The frameworks show it plainly: TCFD gives Risk a full management pillar and Opportunity none, and even ESRS names its process pillar "Impact, Risk and Opportunity management". Opportunity is named, but rarely searched for with the same discipline.
That gap is the reason Nemetan exists. We give the Opportunity side the method it has never had: a systematic, evidence-based way to find the moves where the business benefit and the sustainability benefit come from the same decision. Not sustainability as a cost to be managed down, but as a source of value to be searched for on purpose.
MIKE KELLY, FOUNDER & CEO
Nemetan was founded by Mike Kelly, whose work sits where board-level judgement, sustainability evidence and systematic innovation meet.
He is a Chartered Director with the Institute of Directors, a GRI-certified ESRS Professional, and a Certified Professional Banker holding the Chartered Banker Institute's Certificate in Green and Sustainable Finance. He holds a BSc in Management from the University of Dublin, Trinity College, where he specialised in marketing, which is the discipline of working out where value sits and who wants it. He studied Disruptive Innovation at MIT's Sloan School of Management under Hal Gregersen, co-author of The Innovator's DNA with Clayton Christensen. Behind the qualifications sit more than 25 years as an entrepreneur, building and running businesses across international markets.
That breadth of experience matters to Nemetan. Risk and Opportunity may appear side by side in an IRO assessment, but they are not found in quite the same way. A strong search for Opportunity needs sustainability and financial insight, but also the perspectives of people who understand customers, products, markets and innovation.
Mike built Nemetan to bring together three things that rarely sit in one place: original research, a structured precedent library, and a repeatable Opportunity-discovery method. It grew out of primary research he conducted during his MSc in Sustainability Management at Rotterdam School of Management, where he identified a marked imbalance in the way companies report Risk and Opportunity under double materiality.
Nemetan was built around a simple question: if companies apply systematic processes to finding and managing sustainability-related Risks, why should the search for Opportunity be any less rigorous?
WHAT WE BRING
Four things that rarely sit together
Evidence
A structured library of Shared Value Opportunities, each screened against five tests before it counts.
Research
Original primary research measuring how much less attention Opportunity receives than Risk across material topics.
Method
Ground, SPARK and PROVE: a systematic, repeatable engine, not a workshop's best guess.
Judgement
Precedents are offered as evidence of possibility, with the assumptions made explicit, never as guarantees.
Hire Mike as a public speaker for your event
Mike Kelly has extensive experience as a public speaker. He has previously been hired by companies like Intel and IBM to speak at their events worldwide. He is available for speaking engagements about Nemetan's research, methodologies and the imbalance between how Risks and Opportunities are treated in sustainability.