Tag: Innovation

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GreenBlue

10 Steps to Profitable Sustainability Innovation: An Introduction

The Opportunity
An article published a few weeks ago by Sustainable Brands reported that “UK Firms could generate $156 Billion in annual productivity gains generated by innovations designed to address environmental and social challenges,” based on a report by Accenture, Business in the Community and Marks & Spencer. Yes, $156 Billion with a “B.”  Now, that’s definitely a report that makes a business case for sustainability that’s nearly impossible to argue with.

With these findings, the obvious question is why aren’t we reading articles daily about the capital gains companies are seeing from sustainability initiatives? The simple answer, as I see it, is that innovation is frankly easier said than done. Everyone talks about the need or want to innovate, but very few actually make it to the follow through phase, and innovation that adds real value to a company’s top or bottom line can prove elusive without a roadmap and clear strategy.

Innovation
There is more literature than you could read in a lifetime on innovation. Books like The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton Christensen, Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, Open Innovation by Henry Chesbrough, The Innovative Leader by Paul Sloan, and Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to writing on innovation. New articles pop up daily about how to innovate, entire sections of business magazines are devoted to the it (Inc.’s Innovate Section). So much has been made of this buzzword that there are now at least twelve common “schools of innovation:”

  • Classical: Bessant @ U. of Exeter, UK; Tidd @ U. of Sussex, UK
  • Customer Centric: Von Hippel @ MIT
  • Disruptive: Christensen @ Harvard
  • Management: Hamel @ London Business School;  Semler @ Semco
  • Open: Chesbrough @ UC Berkeley
  • Outcome Driven: Ulwick @ Stratygen
  • Orbit Shifting: Narang @ Erewhon; Sharma @ NXTLYF
  • Strategic: Markides@ London Business School
  • Radical: Rice, Bentley & O’Connor @ RPI
  • Relentless: Phillips @ OVO; NetCentrics
  • Reverse: Govindarajan & Trimble @ Dartmouth
  • Value: Kim and Mauborgne @ INSEAD; Lee @ Value Innovations

At GreenBlue Advisory Services we’ve embraced the Value Innovation methodology, with the help of Dick Lee, founder, CEO and Chief Innovation Officer at Value Innovations, Inc., for our own work driving innovations in sustainability. Value-based innovation has as its central tenet: “delivering exceptional value to the most important customer in the value chain, all the time, every time.” If practiced appropriately, Value Innovation for Sustainability is not innovation for innovation’s sake, but innovation that will deliver returns to your top or bottom line. Like many business improvement methods, such as the well-known Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, and Continuous Improvement, the Value Innovation process for Sustainability is an application of common sense and logic that has been organized in a clear and concise process and is incredibly straightforward. It’s broken down into ten actionable steps, each of which I’ll explain in more detail in my next few posts. But for right now, the steps are as follows:

1. Define the Project, Mission and/or Objectives
2. Define the Value Chain (or Value Web) to Identify Your Most Important Customer
3. Develop “As Is” and “Best in Class” Value Curves with Metrics
4. Perform Contextual Interviews
5. Develop the “To Be” Value Curve
6/7. Validate the “To Be” Value Curve with the Most Important Customer
8. Define the Value Proposition
9. Define How to Deliver the What
10. Confirm with the Most Important Customer that the How (the Innovation) is Compelling

Feel free to keep the conversation going; we’d love to hear your stories about innovation in business, and especially sustainability innovations. How’d it go? Were their unexpected roadblocks? Comment below or feel free to tweet at us @greenblueorg

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GreenBlue

Katherine O’Dea Named GreenBlue's Director of Innovation

We are delighted to announced the appointment of Katherine O’Dea as Senior Director, Advisory Services and Innovation. O’Dea has been an integral part of GreenBlue for the past six years as a Senior Fellow and Director of Advisory Services. While O’Dea will continue to build GreenBlue’s Advisory Services program under this new role, she will also take a lead in mobilizing and coordinating the organization’s innovation efforts.
“I am very pleased to have Katherine in this new leadership role to develop opportunities for GreenBlue to shape the business of sustainability,” said Nina Goodrich, GreenBlue’s Executive Director. “Katherine is the perfect choice to explore new opportunities that will enable the organization to bring strategic sustainability thinking to new industry stakeholders.”
O’Dea brought nearly two decades of experience and leadership in corporate sustainability with her when she joined GreenBlue in 2007 as a Senior Fellow. In that capacity she contributed to various projects for the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, GreenBlue’s flagship project, including the Sustainable Packaging Indicators and Metrics Framework, which later served as the baseline for the Global Protocol for Packaging Sustainability. She also authored practical guidelines for the incorporation of recycled content into both plastic and fiber-based packaging formats.
More recently, O’Dea spearheaded the launch of GreenBlue’s Advisory Services program in 2010, which complements GreenBlue’s industry sector approach but allows it to deepen it’s impact by providing customized sustainability guidance to individual companies. Advisory Services helps business leaders embrace sustainability by applying a deep understanding of sustainability to each company’s particular needs to develop innovative yet practical sustainability solutions. Under O’Dea’s leadership, Advisory Services clients to date have included major brands like Avery Dennison, Coca-Cola, Cadbury, NASA, Nike, and SC Johnson.
In 2013, GreenBlue’s Advisory Services will be rolling out new “off-the-shelf” offerings, including an affordable package design analysis using GreenBlue’s life-cycle based COMPASS® tool. In addition, the program’s material assessment capabilities will be enhanced with the upcoming launch of GreenBlue’s Material IQ™ database, which will help companies better understand the tradeoffs and implications of their material choices.
“I have had the pleasure of working for and with a number of interesting environmental and sustainability organizations in my career, but my work with GreenBlue has been particularly rewarding,” said O’Dea. “It is an organization that is continuously pushing the envelope, and the current leadership team I am joining is highly motivated, energized, and creative. It is also an exciting time for GreenBlue as we are rolling out a new five-year strategy, launching some new tools and resources, and expanding our educational programs internationally.”

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GreenBlue

Standardization and Experimentation Both Needed for Innovation

My colleagues and I have been grappling with what seems to be a persistent conundrum in the sustainability community: that standardization is both a rallying cry of industry and a warning cry of sustainability advocates. Can standardization (via consistent metrics, reporting structures, etc.) help to drive innovation in the long run, or does it instead reinforce the status quo, thwart innovation, and result in higher orders of “sufficiency”?
This is perhaps a false dichotomy, however, as it’s not clear that standardization and innovation are truly at odds with each other. Why should we have to choose between our need to standardize processes versus the desire for continued creativity and experimentation? Ultimately we need both for greater innovation and more sustainable practices.
It is not only PR or marketing departments that want greater consensus and alignment about which sustainability issues are important to prioritize and which are more tangential or well-intentioned “eco-noise.” The ever-present challenge of limited resources (time, attention, human, financial, etc.) with which to explore emerging sustainability issues naturally leads companies to seek standardization to ensure that such exploration is profitable.
But in the eagerness to drive sustainability into something that is more predictable, manageable, and efficient, we must realize that we are just stepping onto the learning curve, not cresting the apex of it. Otherwise the impulse to standardize terminology, conceptual frameworks, what’s important to measure, how it gets measured, and progress assessments may well create another dangerous form of inertia called “sufficiency.” If we drive everything too much toward standardization, sufficiency may move us towards the lowest common denominator—and lose the unpredictable innovation that has defined the sustainability movement.
Like forms of democracy, the human energy, creativity, and experimentation necessary for us to evolve our understanding and practice of sustainability is going to be long, messy, and non-linear. To truly balance the “planet, person, prosperity” equation will require patience, humility, and different measures of progress than we are accustomed to using.
Despite the debate of consistency versus creativity, the truth is sustainability has relied on both standardization and innovation as changes to the status quo often follow the rhythm of divergence and convergence. Pragmatism, caution, predictability, and efficiency favor the forces of convergence (standardization). Creativity, disruptive thinking, risk-taking, and experimentation favor the forces of divergence (experimentation). It is this necessary form of co-dependency that leads to innovation of all sorts. So while one side laments the glacial pace of consistency and the other laments the messiness of the process, we must remember that standardization encourages experimentation, and vice versa, which leads us, unpredictably, to new forms of innovation.