The sustainable innovation blog
by Chris Sherwin
Chris Sherwin is the Director at Reboot Innovation, a creative consultancy on a mission to change what and how we innovate – for a better world. We fuse world-changing innovation, marketing and design with cutting-edge sustainability and ethical business. We are the sustainable innovation partner to brands and innovators who want to practically design a green, fair and prosperous world.
Everyone wants to be more creative and get good ideas and we'll certainly need this for our looming ecological and climate crisis; but how do you practically do this? This blog unpacks lesson's learnt from recent sustainability-led creative events.
Back in 1970, at the dawn of the modern environmental movement, American Futurist Alvin Toffler coined the term 'Future Shock'. Toffler highlighted that the late-20th Century was experiencing a phenomenon unique in human history in which technology was changing faster than people. This in turn led to widespread discomfort and confusion as well as frequent social and economic upheaval.
One important event in the corporate innovation calendar is Boston Consulting Group's annual 'Most Innovative Companies' benchmark. This year Google was again acknowledged for its innovation leadership (holding the number two spot for the fourth year, again behind Apple) and the digital technology giant is also responsible for one of my favourite innovation projects. This blog unpacks the ways that Google, and other leading innovators, can teach us much about how we can and should be innovating for sustainability.
Last week the Church of England and Members of Parliament pledged to go single-use plastic-free for the 40 days of Lent, while the BBC plans to be similarly plastic-free in its operations by 2020. These are the latest (at time of writing at least) in an ever-growing list of sustainable packaging commitments being made at an almost breakneck pace.
If you want to change-the-game on sustainability get started by considering environmental and social issues during early-stage design.
Conjuring up images of lone inventors tinkering with new kit in their sheds, or creatives doing a 'late-one' after a day stretched out on the bean-bag, innovation is one of those zeitgeist words that excites and irritates in equal measure. Many of these metaphors make innovation sound like some sort of secret recipe, a black-box only accessible by a few half-crazed or eccentric individuals.
In August I delivered the Sustainable Innovation Masterclass as part of Edie's webinar series. This generated a great debate and a lot of questions from attendees, that we simply didn't have time to answer in the allotted time. This blog revisits and answer these questions as a way to keep the debate going. Do chip in and let us know what you think.
I recently met with an old colleague who enquired about my fledging sustainable innovation consulting business. "How" he asked "do you get companies to do more transformative innovation rather than simply giving clients the easy innovation option?" It's a great question and I'll return to my answer in a while.
I used to work as a sustainability consultant in a large multi-national manufacturing business. One of my final projects was to conduct a sustainability review of the Research & Development (R&D) portfolio - the function developing new technologies to fuel future innovation for business success.
