Solventum

Maria Watson is a seasoned sustainability leader, heading enterprise sustainability initiatives across operations, governance and business functions. Her work focuses on strengthening organizational resilience, advancing responsible growth and creating long-term value across regulated medtech environments.

Shifting Business Priorities

We approach sustainability by identifying the business problem we are trying to solve. Whether the objective is to win a customer, design a better product, reduce supply chain risk, or prepare for evolving regulations, the challenges are often cross-functional and require collaboration across the organization.

At Solventum, my focus is on bringing together the right functional teams to identify where these business signals intersect. We look at whether the driving force is a customer requirement, a commercial opportunity, or a regulatory trend, and then determine the levers we can use to create the greatest impact.

Sustainability is not always the answer in itself, but it has a role to play in virtually every project. Rather than following a standalone sustainability roadmap, we approach these initiatives as business challenges that require collective problem-solving. This allows us to align sustainability with our broader commercial and growth strategy, helping us make better investment decisions while creating long-term value for both the business and its stakeholders.

Future Healthcare Priorities

I believe sustainability in healthcare needs to move beyond focusing only on product carbon footprints. We need to place greater emphasis on patient outcomes and ensure that procurement decisions based on life cycle assessments continue to support the principle of doing no harm.

The real opportunity lies in looking at both environmental and clinical impact together. While understanding carbon emissions remains important, we also need to ask whether we are helping patients recover faster, reducing surgical site infections and other healthcare-associated infections, lowering the need for antibiotics, and improving healing through better technologies.

Sustainability is not always the answer in itself, but it has a role to play in virtually every project.

These outcomes can also deliver long-term environmental benefits. When infections are prevented and patients recover more quickly, they spend less time in the hospital, which can reduce the resources required for their care. At the same time, hospitals can serve more patients and improve access to care. I believe this is the direction healthcare sustainability should be moving over the next five years.

Leadership Through Systems

The biggest leadership lesson I have learned is the importance of building systems that can replicate what works at scale. It is not enough to deliver a successful standalone initiative, such as a recycling project for a single product. The greater opportunity is to embed those principles into the way products are designed from the beginning, including how their end of life is considered across the entire system.

Today, my focus is on strengthening those systems and operating models so that sustainable practices become part of everyday decision making instead of being treated as isolated projects. I am also exploring how AI can support faster, more informed decisions by strengthening the frameworks we use to evaluate opportunities and make choices.

Building Cross-Functional Support

The most effective way to build lasting support across the business is by listening. I focus on creating a cross-functional approach that takes every perspective and constraint into account before making recommendations for improvement.

Instead of asking commercial teams to support a sustainability agenda, I first seek to understand what success looks like for them and for our hospital systems. For commercial teams, that may mean winning a tender. For engineering, it could be designing a better product. For investor relations, it is about communicating a credible long-term strategy.

When we help each function address its own priorities, collaboration becomes much more natural. Sustainability becomes a meaningful contributor to broader business objectives instead of being viewed as the entire agenda.

Redesigning Sustainability around Better Outcomes

One assumption I would like to reshape is that corporate sustainability is only about reducing environmental impact. From my perspective in healthcare, sustainability is about creating better outcomes.

The goal is not simply to reduce environmental harm. It is to build better systems and design products that improve patient outcomes, help clinicians deliver care more quickly and effectively, strengthen supply chain resilience, support commercial growth, and reduce environmental impact at the same time. When we approach sustainability this way, it becomes a driver of broader value across the healthcare ecosystem.

The future of healthcare lies in redesigning systems around patient outcomes. That is where I believe sustainability can create the greatest long-term value for patients, providers, and the industry as a whole.