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By Betsy Reed

In my last post for Triple Pundit, I talked about the importance of external, B2B collaboration on efforts to address climate change. It’s big, it’s real, it’s too big to tackle alone and it presents unprecedented opportunities for innovation by and success for businesses up to the task.

I spoke to two companies doing some good work engaging their own workforce on climate change. Patrick Blankers from Ericsson will be speaking at the upcoming ‘Companies Vs Climate Change’ conference I’ll be chairing in Brussels October 4-6. Alexandra Heaven from Danone will be in attendance, serving as a catalyst for discussion among delegates as we explore practical ways to collaborate and take conference learnings back to our companies and trigger a shift in the way business is done in regard to addressing climate change.

A lot of us have probably spent a fair amount of time hearing or talking about external collaboration and work – at conferences or in our own work – but genuine internal engagement and collaboration is a crucial approach that’s often left out by a lot of companies I’ve known. Not only does good internal engagement help to mobilize resources within an organization, it’s often a major boost to scaling impact on important issues like climate change. I get why it’s often left out – it can be hard to measure the value of doing it and can prove difficult to retrofit into established work cultures, systems and ways of working. But it’s still important – essentially, it’s mobilizing and informing your own army.

So we asked Ericsson and SAP, who will be speaking at CVCC, and Danone, who will be attending, how they’ve engaged and collaborated internally on climate change. Some common themes emerged – a clear focus, leadership from the top, an investment of thought and resource to engage internally were a few.

Patrick Blankers, Ericsson’s Europe Sustainability Program Manager, who will be speaking on the second day of ‘Companies Vs Climate Change’, talked about their approach to both external and internal collaboration to address climate change.

‘Climate change is probably the biggest challenge for our planet and all living creatures on it. Ericsson strongly believes that the ICT sector has a role to play in providing practical solutions that can help to build a low-carbon society and slow down climate change. Our industry has a unique potential to enable other sectors move towards a low-carbon economy and achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Our own research shows ICT solutions could help to reduce GHG emissions by up to 15 per­cent by 2030, amounting to around 10 gigatonnes of CO2e. That’s more than the cur­rent carbon footprint of the EU and US combined. However, ICT must be developed and rolled out with the intention to address climate change, measuring carbon reduction progress and with an explicit aim to support decision-makers to make the right decisions.’

We asked Patrick about the importance of internal engagement and collaboration in Ericsson’s aims to address climate change. In short, it’s a core part of… everything. From internal targets to innovation projects, it’s embedded throughout the organization, talked about regularly and is part of individual and team targets throughout the business. Ericsson has targets to reduce its GHG emissions in areas like business travel, car fleet, product transportation and facilities. The 2020 goal is to reduce GHG emission by 30 percent, as compared to the 2015 baseline. In the previous period, Ericsson exceeded its emission reduction targets, which helps to build trust among employees and among customers.

Ericsson’s global sustainability vision to be a responsible and relevant driver of positive change for society drives a focus on climate change. Sustainability and climate change is an agenda item at every internal sales and leadership summit and, as mentioned above, targets reflect this priority.

It’s the actual work that counts more than the agenda items, though, and many across Ericsson are working in practical, measurable ways to deliver great work that innovates and reduces impact. This is reflected in their R&D, for example: They are continuing to explore innovations that make alternative energy sources economically feasible, in order to enable a significant reduction in diesel consumption. They recently succeeded at this when they deployed the world’s first “pure solar” 500 watt solar-powered radio site in 2016 in Myanmar. For the first time, solar energy was more economical than diesel. The project was recognized with the GLOMO Award 2017, and it’s being referred to as a major reference in both internal and external communications.

Not only is addressing climate change good for delivering Ericsson’s vision, it's highly integrated in their R&D and business strategy, keeping them cutting-edge and an advocate of innovating technology for good.

So, Ericsson are an enormous company focused on climate change at all levels of its business. This is great news. The even better news is they’re not alone.

If you’re familiar with enterprise software, you’ll know SAP: they’re not only the market leader in it, they’re the world's third largest independent software manufacturer overall. Around the world, they employ 90,000 people of 130 different nationalities. Internal engagement – and engagement particularly around sustainability and climate change – is high on their agenda, and they’re clearly doing it well.

Marcus Wagner, SAP’s Director of Sustainability and Global Environmental Management - also the first speaker to kick off ‘Companies Vs Climate Change’ Brussels - talked to me about SAP’s work to mobilize its workforce to address climate change.

‘SAP’s vision is to help the world run better and improve people's lives. To meet this purpose, we have committed our people and our products to address the world’s biggest economic, environmental, and societal issues and achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. To contribute specifically to Goal 13, Climate Action, we aim to reduce our global greenhouse gas emissions to levels of the year 2000 by 2020 – despite strong company growth. At the beginning of 2017, for example, SAP announced it would become carbon neutral in its operations by 2025.’

Its new Environmental Policy outlines how employees can be part of SAP’s journey to achieve its vision and integrate sustainable practices into their work, through things like reducing waste and energy use and developing solutions that enable SAP customers to create positive environmental impact. Another focus area is improving the impact of corporate cars and employee commuting through carpooling, use of public transportation, and using carbon neutral fuel cards and electric vehicles (SAP for electric vehicles to make up 20% of its car fleet by 2020).

Their sustainability champion programme drives internal collaboration across all regions, countries and lines of business. It includes more than 150 employees worldwide, raising awareness and enabling change to support SAP’s sustainability aims.

What they’re doing actually seems to be working well. In SAP’s 2016 annual employee survey, they ask how important sustainability is and how each employee contributes individually. 92 percent said it’s important for SAP to pursue sustainability and 82 percent of all employees contribute to SAP's sustainability goals.

Patrick from Ericsson and Marcus from SAP will both be speaking at ‘Companies Vs Climate Change’ Brussels in early October. The three days will be packed with opportunities to pick up insights on how businesses can address climate change, share their own and grow their network. Other speakers include Carlsberg, Lidl, Arcelor Mittal, Toyota, Helly Hansen, Walgreen Boots Alliance and others.

Delegates come from a range of roles in companies across Europe and will add their own experience, questions and energy during interactive sessions and networking opportunities. It’s going to be an interesting and engaging mix that will no doubt result in a legacy of knowledge and action that makes a difference.

Join us in Brussels in October. We’d love to have you there. For more information and to register, go to the Companies Vs Climate Change website, follow us on Twitter and join us on LinkedIn.

Betsy Reed will be chairing ‘Companies Vs Climate Change’ Brussels. Over the course of her career in sustainability, Betsy has done a ‘grand tour,’ having worked in and for government, NGOs, communications agencies, tech startups and large corporates like Nestle UK. 

Image credit: Kevin Gill, Flickr

 

We learned two things after Facebook staggered through one of its worst months since the company's founding. First, Mark Zuckerberg’s supposed presidential hopes are over before they even had begun. Second, Facebook and its peers appear to realize they can no longer hide behind their claims they are merely “technology platforms.” Just as Uber is a transportation company, Facebook is a media company - with all the privileges and more importantly, responsibility.

While continuing to grow and reap impressive profits, Facebook focused, politically, on staying "free," or, as Ben Smith of Buzzfeed argued earlier this month on “playing small-ball politics of regulation.” The tech company's purported social mission got lost in the weeds while Facebook leveraged its surging K Street influence to steer clear of regulation. It worked, for a time, but Facebook's freewheeling advertising platform has now been linked to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. “Sad!” for Facebook, as now it is mired in scandal over a $100,000 ad buy: one that allowed a foreign power to have some influence in a U.S. election. Defenders of the company simply infer that such campaign was small pickings and “The vast majority of ads run by these accounts didn’t specifically reference the U.S. presidential election, voting or a particular candidate.” However, the damage is done.

Now Facebook and other leading tech companies are facing increasing chatter about anti-trust litigation, as advocates and leaders from both the left and right have become tired of what they see as these firms’ sprawling influence and unstoppable economic might.

If Facebook and its ilk had focused more on social responsibility in the first place, these companies might not find themselves immersed in their current public relations nightmares. The easy, knee-jerk reaction would be to press ahead as if nothing has happened and line up surrogates to imply that criticisms of the company are unfair.

Well, in 2014 it was not exactly fair for Greenpeace to tar Lego's reputation through its association with Shell. But a video showing an Arctic and Lego building-block landscape becoming flooded with petroleum scored millions of views. Lego ditched a longtime partnership with the energy company, developed a rigorous corporate responsibility agenda and is now seen by many as a forward-thinking, purposeful brand. The company partners with NGOs such as World Wildlife Fund and has promised to invest $160 million in sustainable materials research. And as a result, Lego's reputation not only rebounded quickly, but it also ranks worldwide as one of the world's most respected brands by adults and kids alike - and is making a lot of money while also exuding innovation and of course, solid building block fun.

Facebook's sole purpose, in contrast, appears to ask for a few bucks here and there to promote your posts on Facebook and Instagram. If the company is truly focused on a social or community purpose, that mission is invisible.

Any social mission and purpose now seem vacant within the largest tech titans. Google's "Don't be evil" IPO promise seems laughably quaint. But despite recent setbacks, Google and Amazon could very well salvage their reputations after some wound-licking. Uber, relatively speaking, is in the intensive care unit, but with new leadership, it could recover, provided it finally starts making a profit.

But the "social network" is in a league of its own, and not one other companies wish to join.

Facebook has suffered a massive body blow from which its reputation will need a long time to recover. While the company has long claimed it is been building a “global community,” it has meanwhile unleashed both rhetoric and attorneys in its quest to avert any designation as a media company. However, it does not take a graduate from a top law school to understand that in appearance and function, it is absolutely a media giant. Facebook would have been wise to allocate more resources upfront to the challenges of hate speech and “fake news." These should be top goals for a community-builder too.

The company was clueless as it allowed advertisers to not only target its users by race, but also by “ethnic affinities,” which of course, means that those same groups can also be excluded from marketing campaigns, breaking fair housing laws. Then, of course, it turned out that it was possible to target posts to groups including “How to burn Jews,” “Jew hater,” and those whose field of study included “why Jews ruin the world.” All right, maybe there were only 2,274 people in this “affinity group,” but ProPublica claimed those categories were ripe for targeting (they sure were not designed for excluding) until they contacted Facebook and the company took them down.

Unfortunately for Facebook, rather than handle these challenges head-on, its response for the most part is one of defensive legalese, as in a description of its “information operations” as a directive to ensure that “authentic activity matters.” And in a recent post, Facebook’s chief operations officer, Sheryl Sandberg expressed what looks like inauthentic shock - rather unbecoming for a company that is reputed to hire the best and the brightest:

“We never intended or anticipated this functionality being used this way – and that is on us. And we did not find it ourselves – and that is also on us.”

As Keith Collins of Quartz pointed out, the outcome is a tired argument reminiscent of the National Rifle Association’s mantra during the 1990s:

Facebook’s stance recalls a bumper sticker slogan that was popularized in the 1990s by the National Rifle Association: Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Facebook didn’t spread misinformation and propaganda; the Russians did.

That Russian ad campaigns should have been flagged by Facebook’s sophisticated technology, one that the company has long been quick to tout. And the company should have conducted itself like a media company, disclosing who pays for paid placements. If Facebook followed political ad disclosure laws, like those seen on television, the company could have avoided the humiliation of headlines screaming about being grilled by Congress.

Instead of spending more money on lobbying, Facebook could have diverted much of that money on resources that could have examined the company’s business model and technology and understand how it could be exposed to risks such as nefarious ad buys. If the company had agreed to hold itself to the same standard as media companies, it could have avoided falling prey to those engaged in racial profiling, hate speech and fake news. But Facebook’s leadership chose to dodge responsibility and is now spending far too much time and resources trying to explain its way out of this self-inflicted controversy.

If the company had followed the Global Reporting Institute's reporting framework - particularly related to risk assessment - as meticulously as it has trying to persuade regulators about what kind of company it is and how it should be treated, the company's board and executive team would have had their eyes open to potential threats. In a nutshell, GRI screams out risk, whether they are related to anti-corruption, social impacts and financial value drivers, red flags could have been identified.

Furthermore, Facebook again falls back on its pat answer that it is primarily a "technology platform" when it comes to describing its role as to how it engages with the community. As the company's sustainability manager explains:

"Nonprofits are doing amazing things on our platforms to advance sustainability and address climate challenges by taking action at both the local and global levels."

In this world, that is not good enough. Facebook needs to stop talking about its platform, because as it stands, forces of both good and evil are leveraging the company's technology. The company needs to show that it can support and work with community groups and NGOs to solve these problems. The company may want to take a break from "building" and start "engaging." If the company is doing that, it is not obvious. And as a result, the company with a mission that strives “to build community and bring the world closer together” has allowed itself to be known as one that was harnessed to tear some people down and drive others further apart.

Image credit: JD Lasica/Flickr

Recovery efforts from hurricanes Harvey and Irma have focused on restoring power to millions of customers as quickly as possible, not on sparking a sea change in the way electricity is produced and distributed in the U.S. However, the Energy Department has fostered a long-term initiative to develop a more resilient, reliable grid. It just pumped $32 million into a nationwide network of projects aimed at that goal. Not surprisingly, the seven projects share a common strategy that leans heavily on microgrids powered in-part by solar energy and other distributed renewables.

For businesses at risk of long-term power outages associated with violent weather, the focus on resiliency is welcome news.

Despite coal rhetoric, Trump administration focuses on the modern grid  -- and renewables

The disastrous 2017 hurricane season provides clear and tragic evidence that the U.S. electricity grid is not equipped to handle the long-term impacts of climate change, including rising sea levels and an increase in extreme weather events. Grid reliability has long been an ongoing concern for U.S. energy planners, but until recent years, stability efforts focused on conventional models of centralized electricity production. The focus switched to modernizing the grid with distributed energy production and microgrids under the Obama administration, as former President Obama's promotion of renewables and energy storage technology opened up a whole new range of pathways toward resiliency. The U.S. Department of Defense has been an early adopter of the microgrid + renewables + storage strategy. That includes ensuring reliable, moveable power for U.S. fighting forces overseas as well as hardening domestic bases against energy supply disruptions. The platform for the Energy Department's grid resiliency efforts is the Grid Modernization Initiative, a sprawling endeavor that includes academic research centers, utilities and other private sector partners and numerous public sector partners. Despite a recent new "grid study" that was purported to favor the coal industry, the Energy Department has been forging ahead with the Grid Modernization Initiative (for the record, the "grid study" ended up suggesting that coal cannot survive in today's power generation market unless federal lawmakers provide it with more taxpayer subsidies). The Energy Department is also bringing SunShot, another major Obama-era initiative, into the grid resiliency effort. The original SunShot goal was to reduce the cost of solar power to parity with fossil fuels by 2020. Last week the Energy Department announced that the SunShot goal was well in hand (and already met three years ahead of schedule, for utility-scale solar), and that the program is pivoting to a 2030 goal that includes a greater commitment to grid resiliency.

$32 Million for the resilient grid of the future

Keeping in mind all of the above, plus the national defense and homeland security angles, let's take a look at those seven grid resiliency projects. The awards represent the second round of funding through the Grid Modernization Initiative. Energy Secretary Rick Perry put the program into perspective when he announced the seven projects last week:

“A resilient, reliable, and secure power grid is essential to the nation’s security, economy, and the vital services that Americans depend on every day. As round-the-clock efforts continue to help communities recover from the devastation of hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the need to continue strengthening and improving our electricity delivery system to withstand and recover from disruptions has become even more compelling..."

The announcement also made it clear that centralized coal power plants are toast:

The seven Resilient Distribution Systems projects were awarded to DOE’s Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium (GMLC), which will develop and validate innovative approaches to enhance the resilience of distribution systems, including microgrids, with high levels of clean, distributed energy resources and emerging grid technologies at regional scale...

Unfortunately for wind and solar fans, when the Energy Department uses the word "clean," it doesn't necessarily mean renewable. Fossil natural gas and small scale modular nuclear power plants could also be in the mix. Nevertheless, as a group the awardees are carving a path that helps speed up the transition to a more sustainable energy future. These include: GRIP -- The Grid Resilience and Intelligence Platform will deploy advanced analytics to shepherd distributed renewables through grid disruptions. RADIANCE -- The Resilient Alaskan Distribution System Improvements using Automation, Network Analysis, Control, and Energy Storage focuses on a "zonal" approach that networks microgrids while reducing the chance of widespread outages from cyber threats or extreme weather. OpenFMB is an open-source specifications platform for power systems, which will be leveraged to improve resiliency through a flexible combination of conventional power sources and distributed renewable energy. HEMS -- Home Energy Management Systems will leverage new "smart grid" technology to enable interactive energy management down to the granular level of individual households: CleanStart-DERMS -- This one is especially interesting in terms of the potential to leverage distributed energy resources (DER) for storm recovery.

The objective of this project is to validate and demonstrate at scale a DER-driven mitigation, blackstart and restoration strategy for distribution feeders with integration of applied robust control, communications and analytics layer, and coordinated hierarchical solution.

Resilient Distribution Systems addresses pathways to improving integrated energy resource planning, partly through energy storage and regional partnerships. As for how all these pieces will fit together, the seventh award goes to a "Laboratory Valuation Analysis Team" that provides for consistency and information sharing among the six other projects, with the aim of synthesizing them into a more holistic plan for the modern grid. Image: Map of research locations for $32 million grid resiliency funding round via US DOE.  

The very mention of gold conjures wealth, prestige, quality and power, but for those who work in the extractives industry, the reality is usually far different. Add the fact that most of the world’s more prolific gold deposits are located in remote regions of the world, and the result is an environmental footprint exacerbating what are already endemic human rights problems. Whether gold is mined for jewelry or electronics such as smartphones, the harsh truth for those working within the sector is that gold mining is a dirty and dangerous industry.

And most buyers and traders in the gold industry are only concerned with ensuring the metal arrives at its final destination, whether it is in Dubai, China, Europe or the U.S. What they often do not check is the environmental impact of that gold or if child labor was involved in its extraction. “We buy the gold. We do not care where it is from. If you have the gold we shall buy it,” said one firm interviewed by the Guardian last year.

“Artisan,” or more-localized mining, often offers a better quality of life for miners of gold and other precious metals and minerals. And if they can gain a fair price, while that gold can be traceable throughout a company's supply chain, then everyone in the industry can benefit.

To that end, the London-based Fairtrade Foundation has launched a program that it hopes can help scale fair trade-certified gold.

Over the next few years, Fairtrade aims to gain as much as $2 million in investments that will boost the prospects for small-scale mining sites across East Africa. Many of these operations simply need financing in order to boost productivity – and if they can do so safely and sustainably, they can provide businesses a valuable metal that can help communities instead of harming them.

According to Michael Gidney, CEO of Fairtrade, assistance developing a market for fair trade gold has come from many directions. The British NGO Comic Relief, for example, last year contributed almost £870,000 ($1.2 million) in grants to support this mining program in East Africa. The Dutch government has worked with companies in the Netherlands to forge an agreement to use responsibly-sourced gold in its products. Companies including Fairphone and Philips have also promised to use more of this gold within their devices.

So far, plans call for a small amount of fair trade gold to be in some jewelry lines in time for Christmas this year. Meanwhile, Fairtrade will work with its corporate partners to ramp up the production of gold in Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya.

While most consumers associate gold with jewelry, it is also important to the functionality of smartphones. According to Dell, while gold is not as fast of a conductor as silver, it is far more resistant to corrosion. Only 10 troy ounces (three-fifths of a pound) are in a ton of smartphone; that may not sound like much, but considering the demands for smartphones and how quickly phone companies convince customers to "upgrade," that adds to the strain in an industry already struggling to meet global demand.

The challenge for Fairtrade is that it will need to document and quantify the benefits for these communities. Plus fair trade efforts within the mining industry have kicked off before, only to fade from view. There is no shortage of critics who charge that the fair trade movement benefits the NGOs involved in the space rather than the actual people who harvest everything from coffee to cacao to now, gold. But considering the tales of people digging up their villages to find the smallest nugget of gold, any steps industry stakeholders can take is an improvement from the status quo.

Image credit: Fairtrade Association

Leather may be supple, comfortable and attractive for apparel, shoes and accessories, but it also has a massive environmental footprint. Leather tanneries use huge quantities of water and chemicals, and the material often processed in countries where regulations are weaker and are held back even further by lax enforcement. In the view of one Gizmodo writer, “leather is slowly killing the people and places that make it.”

Nike, which has already built a strong reputation as a leader in developing innovative fabrics and materials for its apparel and footwear, says it has developed a low-carbon, low-impact leather material that could become “game-changing” for both its performance and role in boosting waste diversion across its supply chain.

“Flyleather,” says the company, is the next FlyKnit. The company cites statistics suggesting that up to 30 percent of the leather derived from animals such as cattle is lost during processing and those scraps end up in landfill. But Nike eliminates that waste stream by gathering those scraps and then shredding them into fibers. Those recycled fibers, in turn, are blended with synthetic fibers via a manufacturing process that combines the materials into the Flyleather product.

Reviews of the material indicate that the material is just as soft as conventional leather while also boasting a similar texture. “Brings cowskin into the 21^st century,” crowed Wired Magazine, noting Flyleather's strength, flexibility and minimal weight.

Nike claims the development of this material was driven partly by the fact that leather has the second-highest impact on both its carbon emissions and water consumption. Flyleather, the company insists, uses 90 percent less water and has a carbon footprint 80 percent lower than the conventional material. Hence, one pair of athletics shoes made with this product has about half the carbon footprint of shoes manufactured out of traditional leather. And instead of coming from a hide, which of course can vary by size, shoes incorporating this material are cut from a roll. The outcome is improved manufacturing efficiency and the elimination of most of the waste associated with shoe production.

The result, exults Nike, is a material 40 percent lighter, yet five times stronger than traditional leather. Athletic shoes designed for sports such as football and basketball were once largely made out of leather, but over time that material was swapped out for materials that performed much better on the field or court. Nike, however, believes Flyleather has the potential to be used for high-performance footwear in the near future.

Of course, Flyleather does not solve the problem of animals still being slaughtered to make shoes, an outcome that rankles animal welfare activists. The animal rights group PETA slammed Nike’s announcement, describing it as a “scam:”

“Half of Nike’s Flyleather is made from the skins of sensitive cows who didn’t want to die—the same struggling animals from the same bloody tanneries that produce any other leather, with nothing “recycled” about it. PETA urges Nike to embrace the vegan half of Flyleather and switch entirely to high-performance, sustainable vegan leather.”

But as is the case with sustainability at large, these changes are not about an overnight transformation: for Nike and other apparel and fashion companies, a development such as Flyleather is about making incremental-but-significant changes. Innovations such as Flyleather allow Nike to retain its customers, remain profitable, and in the end, push the envelope even further in developing materials that are both high-performance and more environmentally responsible. Given Nike’s track record over the past several years, an animal- and completely cruelty-free alternative to leather is most likely not far off.

Image credit: Nike

In his book ‘The Way to Design,” Steve Vassalo quotes John Arnold, who taught a course at Stanford in the early ‘60s called ‘How to Ask a Question’: “Each of man's advances was started by a question….Knowing what questions to ask and how to ask them is sometimes more important than the eventual answers.”

When it comes to new products and services, this design-based approach is reflected in the search for the intersection of desirability (do people want it?), feasibility (is it technologically and organizationally possible?) and viability (is it financially viable?). Tim Brown of IDEO called the process required to reach this sweet spot design thinking: “A human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

 

Source: IDEO

The problem is that when it comes to sustainability these questions are not enough. While questions on desirability, viability and feasibility can help products like the new iPhone hit the jackpot, they give flawed direction at best on how to make them more sustainable, as they are still a manifestation of a ‘business as usual’ mindset, where sustainability play a very small role. As a result, while each phone may show improvement in some green aspects (for example in terms of GHG emission reductions per phone - from 67 kg in iPhone 7 Plus to 57 kg in the iPhone 8), there is no consideration whatsoever of the systematic planned obsolescence embedded in its design and what it means for society and the environment.

Let’s face it - when it comes to sustainability the Venn diagram above just falls short. To achieve sustainable innovation we need a new set of questions, which will go hand in hand with the old ones.

You may think there’s a bit of naiveté in assuming that a couple of questions can help companies come up with products and services that are more sustainable. You may be right, but at the same time asking the right questions can make a whole lot of a difference, as they force us to consider issues that we may have not pay attention to otherwise. As Steve Vassalo puts it: “Asking the right question is half the answer.”

In this case, since the goal is to generate a sustainable innovation framework that could be applied to any new product or service, we need to think on a relatively simple framework that won’t require generating a long CSR report for every new product or service. We also want to enable stakeholders to evaluate the answers in a relatively simple way to make the whole process valuable and not just another pointless exercise in corporate social responsibility.

My inspiration comes from Harold Pollack who wrote simple personal finance advice on an index card, showing that guidelines for responsible financial behavior can be simple and straightforward. I believe that so can be the guidelines regarding sustainability companies should consider when they work on new products and services. If a complex issue like personal finance can be simplified into ten rules that can be scribbled on a small index card, why not sustainable innovation?

In this case though I am going to frame the guidelines as questions to enable companies to answer YES or NO for each one of them. The idea is to add accountability to the guidance by forcing companies to provide a clear and simple answer on where the new product/service stands. To choose the 'right questions,' I follow the lead of Meerow and Newell’s holistic approach to urban resilience by considering the five Ws of urban resilience: resilience of what, to what, and for whom?

Meerow and Newell’s five Ws of urban resilience:

 

According to the Meerow and Newell, the five Ws questions “bring the politics of resilience to the forefront by encouraging the explicit recognition of politicized decisions, scalar dimensions, and trade-offs inherent to applying resilience empirically.” Thus, using the five Ws framework as a starting point can bring both the necessary gravity and a more systemic context to avoid the ‘change as usual’ discourse, which is so common in sustainable innovation.

So, why sustainable innovation and ‘of what, for where, for when, and for whom?'

For whom? This is simply about who is going to benefit from the new product/service. A more holistic and stakeholder-centered approach to innovation requires companies to consider all their key stakeholders, including society and the environment and what the net impact its new product/service has on them. Bocken, Rana and Short’s value mapping tool can be used to evaluate the value created and destroyed for each one of the key stakeholders.

While determining whether the net impact on each stakeholder is positive or negative can be a messy process, it is essential in order to give companies a way to truly understand and evaluate their impacts on stakeholders. I also believe it is essential to make it clear that companies cannot claim for positive stakeholder impact, unless all of their stakeholders are indeed positively affected by the new product/service. Otherwise, we’ll keep having new phones that have lower carbon footprint, but at the same time help make planned obsolescence the norm.

Question: Does the new product/service have a net positive impact on the wellbeing of all the company’s key stakeholders?

Of what? The What question will be used to focus on the different types of capital used to produce a new product or service – what are they, how they are used and whether we can consider this use responsible? The Cradle to Cradle (C2C) design process (inventory, assessment, and optimization) and principles (material health and reutilization, renewable energy, water stewardship and social fairness) can provide some guidance on what responsible use of various forms of capital mean (another resource is Forum for the Future’s Five Capitals Model). Given the growing use of technology and data, it is important to acknowledge the need to force ethical and responsible use of these forms of capital as well.

Question: Does the new product/service use all types of capital responsibly?

For when? Are companies innovating for here and now or do they have also any consideration of future generations? I believe they need to move to a more balanced approach, based on the understanding that “sustainability is actually not just meeting our needs and others needs. It’s actually about growth. It’s about inter-generational value creation,” as Bill McDonough suggests. His approach of “having intergenerational assets instead of intergenerational liabilities”, which is manifested in principle #5 of the Hannover Principles (create safe objects of long-term value) he wrote with Michael Braungart 25 years ago, should guide every new innovation.

Question: Does the new product/service create inter-generational value?

For where? Are companies considering the places where their innovations are used and the impacts of these new products/services on these places? Probably not, as innovations are almost never conceptualized in spatial terms. In other words, there is no real consideration of the impact of the innovation on neighborhoods, cities, regions, etc. This question aims to change it by considering the impact of the new product or service on cities’ resilience. Why cities? They, as Michael Berkowitz, President, 100 Resilient Cities explain “are at the forefront of local solutions to the global problems of climate change and inequality.” For companies, it is therefore crucial to ensure cities are becoming more resilient as cities’ wellbeing goes hand in hand with business’ wellbeing: You can’t have an healthy business in an unhealthy environment.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities defines urban resilience as “the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience.” Companies can look at The Rockefeller Foundation & Arup’s City Resilience Framework as guidance to figure out how their new products/services can have a positive impact on cities’ resilience.

Question: Does the new product/service make cities more resilient?

Why? As part of the effort to transform the way companies approach innovation, we need to contextualize it within a broader system and make a clear case that a sustainable innovation is one that improves a dysfunctional system. The reason is very simple – we can’t talk about urgency without acknowledging the systems that shape our lives are in urgent need of change. The ‘why we do it’ question or the purpose that (hopefully) drives the work on new products/services needs to be reframed and focus on the real needs of one of the so many dysfunctional systems that shape our lives. Otherwise, what’s the point in innovation? To make it feasible a Yes answer doesn’t require (for now) a radical improvement of a dysfunctional system, but it is certainly more preferable than an incremental change.

Question: Does the new product/service improve* a dysfunctional system (i.e. education, healthcare, housing, food, etc.)?

*preferably a radical change, not an incremental one.

Et voilà, here is my index card of the five Ws of sustainable innovation – 5 questions a company should ask and answer for every new product or service:

 

Now, answering these questions will require some effort, but they are not and should not be impossible to answer. In my vision, companies would add this index card to each new product or service they launch. They will be required to provide a more detailed PDF on their website, in which they explain what their replies are based on. Based on the number of Yes answers, we could then rate each new product/service – 5 Yes answers will equal five stars, 4 Yes answers will equal four stars, etc. You got the idea. The next step would be to require every new product/service to have a minimum of 3 stars. While companies will be responsible for providing the answers, it will be the responsibility of its stakeholders to keep it accountable and to look for any misleading replies. The result would be hopefully a virtuous cycle of greater transparency, responsibility and sustainability.

This may all sounds like a utopian dream or hallucination given the current dominating paradigm in business, in which innovation usually has almost nothing to do with sustainability, and when sustainability is considered quite narrowly. However, it doesn’t mean change is not possible. I do not think companies can make the shift on their own as they are invested too much in the current paradigm, but if stakeholders demand companies ask and answer these questions and work together to make it happen, it will happen!

* This is version 1.0 of the index card, which is still work in progress, and therefore I’ll appreciate any feedback you have. Feel free to add your comments or email me here.

Image credit: Boegh

 

Food waste has long been a problem on both sides of the Atlantic, with estimates suggesting that as much as 40 percent of all food in the U.S. and U.K. ends up in the trash bin. One huge part of this problem is confusing food labeling. Terms such as “best by,” “use by” and “sell by” are only a few examples that often leave consumers puzzled. Now industry is taking notice. Earlier this year, the Grocery Manufacturers Association said it would move to standardize food labeling nationwide.

Recently the Consumer Goods Forum, a global food industry network that boasts executives from about 400 retailers, manufacturers and food service companies, said it will urge its membership to simplify date labels by 2020.

In what the association describes as a “Call to Action,” food companies and retailers will be asked to take three steps in order to streamline date labeling. First, they will only use one label. Next, they will have a choice: a term such as “use by” for perishable items, and “best if used by” for non-perishables.

The challenge the Consumer Goods Forum faces is that with this caveat: “the exact wording will be tailored to regional context.”

Hence the third step: food companies will have to ramp up education and awareness efforts in order for their customers to grasp what exactly these date labels mean.

Where opportunities lie, however, is the chance for NGOs to step in and partner with these companies’ education efforts, whether they include in-store displays, web campaigns or public service announcements. And companies could use the assistance: the Consumer Goods Forum announced in 2015 that it seeks to slash food waste by its membership 50 percent within a decade.

Companies that are aligned with the Consumer Goods Forum include Bimbo, the largest baking company in the world; retailers Carrefour and Walmart; and food manufacturers Campbell’s Soup Company, Kellogg, Nestlé and Unilever.

For these companies, reducing food waste is more than about burnishing environmental credentials or improving their brands’ reputations. Companies can improve their profit margins as they become more efficient by tackling waste. According to a World Resources Institute study released earlier this year, for every $1 a company spends on waste diversion, it has the potential to gain a return on investment of up to $14 dollars. Better employee training, improved packaging and a leaner supply chain are just a few examples of how companies can benefit in the long run from focusing on food waste.

Consumers would score an economic boost as well, as the Consumer Goods Forum estimated that the average family in the U.S. loses $1,500 a year on food that is thrown away.

Standardizing food labels is just a start. More can be done, such as retailers’ efforts to sell imperfect, or “ugly” fruits and vegetables. Changing regulations so that companies can donate food with minimal legal risks would also help. But stopping food waste at home is necessary to halt the flow of food from homes to landfill instead of on plates and in lunch boxes.

Image credit: Folsom Natural/Flickr

While companies and celebrities are stepping forward to help secure funds and supplies for post- Hurricane Harvey relief, a coalition of non-profit groups have urged political leaders to ensure that public funds for aid go to the people that need it most – and not to companies that they argue have had leading roles in creating the mess that will take years to cleanup.

In a letter, signed by over 130 NGOs including 350.org, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, these various groups demand that recovery funds make their way to local communities that can benefit from relief funds. They worry that energy and petrochemical companies will unfairly benefit, even though from their point of view, these industries have “compounded” Harvey’s impact far beyond southeastern Texas.

The organizations released this letter a week after Marvin Odum, formerly head of Shell’s U.S. operations, was appointed as the leader of recovery efforts in Houston. With Odum tapped to direct the post-Harvey relief and cleanup efforts, NGO leaders say they are concerned that public funds could be used to compensate companies whose greenhouse gas emissions could have contributed to the hurricanes. Almost one month after Harvey walloped Texas, these groups can easily emphasize their point considering Hurricanes Irma, Jose and Maria have wreaked their fair share of havoc across the Caribbean and adjacent regions.

"For years, Texas state government has prioritized oil, gas, and chemical industry profits ahead of the public interest, and Texans have paid the price with their health, their property, and their environment," says Earthworks South Texas Organizer Priscilla Villa in a public statement. "Harvey must be the event that changes our government from industry lackeys into public leaders who accept the reality of climate change and act on it by quickly moving away from dirty fossil fuels and plastics and towards a renewable energy future."

The damage Harvey left behind includes pollutants from over 400 water treatment plants that could have contaminated soil and waterways across coastal Texas and Louisiana. Those risks are in addition to the damage local refineries suffered during Harvey. But despite suggestions that as many as 4.6 million pounds of chemicals may have leaked due to the hurricane, a local Environmental Protection Agency laboratory that could have a role in gauging the level of cleanup needed is still scheduled to be closed. Having a former energy company executive lead this recovery, therefore, makes local activists and non-profits worry that money and resources will not be fairly and transparently distributed.

NGOs point to the recovery effort that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Following that disaster, these groups charge that billions of dollars that were needed to rebuild communities were instead largely disbursed to energy and petrochemical companies. They cite an estimate that concluded such companies received as much as 65 percent of proceeds from tax-except bonds issued by Louisiana’s state government in the years following that hurricane.

Funds for the Harvey relief effort, these groups insist, should offer opportunities for families and local businesses to rebuild, while other investments could be made to mitigate public health and other risks last month’s hurricane left behind. “In order for these dialogs to begin in earnest and begin to yield results, federal and state recovery dollars must be directed to affected families and communities, not to oil, gas, and petrochemical companies,” concluded the letter.

Image credit: U.S. Army/Wiki Commons

It doesn´t take a rocket scientist to realize that the economy is not working for many. Despite record-breaking stock market performance and record profits from many banks and technology companies, income inequality in many advanced countries, especially in the U.S., has actually been worsening. In 2010, Oxfam found that the richest 388 billionaires around the globe had the same aggregate wealth that the poorest 50 percent of the people on the planet had (i.e., 388 people had the same wealth as about 3.5 billion people combined). In 2015, the number of wealthy people required to match the total income of the bottom 50 percent had dropped to just 62 while the top one percent of the world’s wealthiest now had more combined wealth than the rest of the 99 percent of the world’s population. In 2017, the number had dwindled to just the wealthiest eight!

Labor productivity has never been greater but the rewards from this are not being evenly distributed. In fact, artificial intelligence, robotics, and smart devices are wreaking havoc on labor markets and generating growing calls for basic income to help avert even worse income inequality in the coming years. Aside from rampant inequalities, we seem to be stuck in making real progress on climate change and losses of biodiversity. In short, many of us have begun to question whether market-based capitalism as we know it is capable of improving conditions for planet and people.

Throughout the past several years I have been conducting research on a range of sustainable entrepreneurial initiatives around the globe, interviewing hundreds of inspiring entrepreneurs along the way. What I have come to realize is that there is a new wave of entrepreneurial organizing around the world, oriented toward making things better for the 99 percent. Yet much of this organizing does not fit the mold of traditional, capitalist approaches to startups, venture finance, growth and exit.

In my latest book, I refer to this phenomenon as post-capitalist entrepreneurship. For me it is something more than just entrepreneurship that also seeks to balance social and/or ecological impacts. Post-capitalist entrepreneurship (PCE) instead is about changing the underlying logic of entrepreneurial organizing, governance models, legal structures, approach to intellectual property, perception of consumption and production and of course the ultimate objectives and metrics of success.

In my view there is somewhat of a continuum of PCE from those closest to our current understanding of market-based entrepreneurship to more extreme versions of PCE:

For-benefit (B Corps)
On the surface, B Corps may seem like mere representations of responsible market-based entrepreneurship. After all, the majority of B Corps are for-profit enterprises, frequently with board of directors, closed, intellectual property models, private ownership and often receive traditional investment from angels and venture capitalists. Some B Corps are even publicly traded on traditional stock exchanges (e.g. Etsy, Natura). What makes B Corps the starting point for PCE is that they are legally bound to embrace social and ecological concerns. If “there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits” as the famed economist, Milton Friedman wrote in Capitalism and Freedom, then companies who legally bound themselves to something beyond profits, as B Corps do, are something different than what we think market-based enterprises are about.

Platform Cooperatives
The media has offered plenty of coverage of the platform capitalist business models like Uber, Airbnb and Task Rabbit. Yet, what has been underexplored so far is the emergence of alternative models of sharing economy platforms which embrace ideas like the commons and cooperative governance. The platform cooperative movement is picking up steam with support from the Platform Cooperative Consortium, as well as a growing number of innovators embracing the Occupy Movement´s values, but leveraging technology to turn their activism into collective entrepreneurial action.

Peer Production and Consumption While most of the sharing economy, including platform cooperatives, are primarily oriented towards recirculated goods and skills in society more efficiently, there is something potentially even more impactful happening mostly in cities around the globe. The maker movement is picking up steam around the globe, supported by the 1100 Fab Labs, platforms like Etsy which connect makers with distributed customers seeking unique, instead of mass-produced products made in China, and numerous other democratized technologies making innovation more affordable for the 99 percent.

Loic Le Goueff, a 27-year-old Swiss national agrarian, and his partner launched a startup called Aquapioneers. Through access to Barcelona’s Green Fab Lab, the pair had managed to design and build a closed loop aquaponics device which can be used by homeowners and renters to produce their own vegetables at their homes with minimum investment and low operating costs. What makes Aquapioneers so interesting is that they have committed to the maker community and to open source hardware. In fact, they are making their design freely available for downloading and printing at the more than 1,100 Fab Labs around the world.

The Fab City initiative encourages member cities to commit to producing at least 50 percent of everything consumed in the city by 2054. More than a dozen cities around the world including Amsterdam, Barcelona, Boston, Detroit and Santiago, Chile, have already made the ambitious commitment. To achieve these goals cities such as Barcelona have been supporting a grassroots maker movement of producers and consumers for everything from energy and housing to furniture and food. Sometimes cash changes hands while in others, alternative currencies, even local, social, cryptocurrencies are being used to encourage value exchange.

Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAOs) Still mostly a dream, the idea behind DAOs is that you could have platforms connecting users for exchange without an intermediary monetizing the transactions. Think Uber without Uber in the middle, Airbnb without Airbnb. DAOs would be blockchain-enabled platforms facilitating exchange through smart contracts and distributed ledgers but no ownership of the platform. Essentially DAOs are like open source software supported by developers around the globe designed to take out the platform capitalist intermediaries and their venture capitalists. One of the most advanced experiments in the DAO space is OpenBazaar which essentially aims to be like eBay without eBay.

Conclusion I am not so naïve as to suggest that capitalism is dead or perhaps that it could die anytime soon. Instead, what I am saying, is that capitalism, and the short-termism that frequently emerges, does not appear to be capable of addressing the world´s most pressing problems. But rather than just protest in the street like the Occupy Movement did, we are starting to witness a new, collective movement of entrepreneurs and citizens aiming to take matters into their own hands by creating new organizational models (or remaking old ones like the platform cooperativism movement) to challenge the status quo and to create a new kind of economy, one that it is frequently more local but at the same time interconnected globally. Can the post-capitalist entrepreneurship movement operate in parallel with, and successfully compete against venture capital-backed and publicly-traded traditional enterprises? Will the PCE movement help us create a more circular, sustainable and just economy in time to avert even worse crises of inequality and climate change? I do not have clear answers to these questions, but I prefer to be optimistic about their chances. How about you?

Image credit: Brad Crooks