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Unleashing brands as agents of transformative change
Sally Uren, February 1st 2010, Business, Innovation, Retail
Consumer brands have the power to create huge change, helping millions of customers lead better, more sustainable lives.
A growing number of big businesses are making sustainability a core part of their brand, (we’ve looked at the business reasons behind this in a previous piece) and this is hugely encouraging to anyone concerned with our planet’s future.
Generally speaking, consumers don’t particularly trust governments. You only need to flick through public opinion polls asking who people trust to see that politicians tend to do quite badly, and in the UK, in the wake of the expenses scandal, trust in politicians is probably at an all time low. So, governments exhorting the general public to do their bit to save our ailing planet will only ever have limited success.
But, generally speaking, consumers do trust brands. Whether we like it or not, there is often an emotional attachment to our favourite brands, although often at a sub-conscious level. The power of that consumer/brand love-in is proved by the massive waves of disapproval when a brand gets things wrong, from using child labour in sweat shops (think back to Nike), to charging more for underwear for, ahem, the fuller figure (M&S has almost recovered from this blip in its otherwise savvy reading of its customers).
And the need to shift towards more sustainable patterns of consumption is urgent. We are running perilously low on resources. We have to cut carbon out of our daily lives, and soon. In order to meet the scale of the challenge, we need to muster every tactic possible to move from our high-carbon, resource-intensive lifestyles to low-carbon loveliness. Now is not the time to get precious about the morality of deploying business and brands to help provide the solutions to our current crisis.
So, just how can the humble brand communicate the sustainability agenda in such a way that encourages more sustainable behaviours, from how a product is used, to what the consumer does with it at the end of its life?
At this point it’s worth remembering that when it comes to green and sustainability issues, the average consumer is confused and disempowered. He or she is also very clear that business needs to do its bit – there needs to be a clear compact between the brand and the consumer – based on ‘I will if you will’. Finally, most people want simple actions, not a menu of complicated and often contradictory choices.
Which means that when it comes to communicating sustainability, brands must remember that labels have their limits. It is estimated that most of us take an average 45 seconds to make choices when we’re buying our everyday necessities, and a proliferation of sustainability labels, be they fair trade, red tractors or carbon labels, may influence the purchase, but won’t lead to any changes in behaviour.
Simple messages are needed to cut through the clamour of labels. The Ariel ‘Turn to 30oC’ is perhaps one of the most successful pieces of brand communication on this agenda – a very clear message encouraging the customer to do something very simple. It won’t save the planet on its own – but millions of people turning to 30 oC just might help.
Motivating consumers as a group – convincing them that their own simple actions can make a difference - is a key to successful sustainability communications. Unilever’s relatively new ‘Clean Planet Plan’, currently promoted here in the UK through its Persil brand, has the power of collective action at its heart, trumpeting the strapline, ‘lots of small actions = a big difference’.
Two final tips for effective consumer communications. The first is something the green movement has got horribly wrong in the past, and might be one reason public support for green issues has taken so long to muster. Make people feel good. Urging consumers to do their bit by scaring them and painting a more sustainable world as the equivalent of living in a cave with a candle, weirdly enough, doesn’t tend to make people want to change. You stand much more chance of success by showing the links between using less energy and saving money, or recycling products and saving beautiful countryside from being used as a waste dump.
Finally, tell your customers about the success of your efforts. In celebrating the successes of Plan A, M&S is able to share a whole range of facts, from the money it has been able to give to charities to the thousands and thousands of recycled coat hangers. Generally, this all helps to show that the M&S/consumer compact is making a difference.
We live in interesting times, and brands are definitely getting better at helping the consumer do the right thing. But, so far, only a small handful have dared enter the ultimate hard-core sustainability territory, where the penny has dropped that actually, sustainability might just being about selling less stuff. Reducing impacts in the product use phase does make a difference, but not if the absolute numbers of people using those products keeps going up.
For now, innovation still has a big role to play in giving us truly sustainable products and services, but that is only part of the answer. The other part is quite straightforward - we simply need to consume less stuff.
An edited version of this article appeared in the Guardian Sustainable Business section.
Paint your business green with sustainable innovation
Chris Sherwin, January 27th 2010, Built environment, Business, Innovation, Procurement
Innovation is famously described as one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration – great ideas are rarely enough, the challenge is to execute them.
Sustainable innovation can be a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating process. Our latest report Paint the Town Green has been more than three years in the making but what a story we have to tell.
The report is about a multi-year innovation collaboration which set the goal of creating sustainable paint systems, and about the new products, services and processes which came out of it. It explains how to conduct innovation driven by environmental and social responsibility and why it makes good business sense.
Its not that I’m especially excited by paint – though I must confess to a soft spot after working on it for so long. Essentially the report shows how to use sustainability as a new lens to reinvent and rethink every aspect of our life. If we can do this with paint, imagine what you can do with cars, mobile phones, homes and holidays.
The three-year project set out to study the entire lifecycle of paint – from raw materials through to manufacturing, use and disposal - to find ways to make it more sustainable. It brought together ICI Paints AkzoNobel, a manufacturer and supplier, construction group Carillion, a major user of paint, and Forum for the Future.
Here are a few of the innovations:
- Dulux Ecosense, a new range of eco-paint with half the carbon and water footprint of the standard paint sold two years ago and 40 per cent less waste.
- Improved cans which use less plastic and are easier to clean and recycle.
A recycling scheme in which vehicles delivering paint to Dulux Decorator Centres bring back used cans. - Envirowash - a mobile brush and roller cleaning station for building sites: instead of pouring contaminated water down the drains it is captured for reuse with the paint residue filtered out.
- Manufacturing improvements that save millions of litres of water used in cleaning production equipment by using it to make new paint.
We also developed new tools for the project like our Streamlined Lifecycle Assessment (SLCA) method and Environmental Impact Analyser – a tool to measure the key impacts of a proposed new formulation and compare them against an existing product. This was the key which allowed ICI Paints AkzoNobel to develop both Ecosense and Ecosure trade paint, which won Green Product of the year in the Green Business Awards 2009.
Paint the Town Green marks a unique point in Forum’s innovation work. Some years ago we resolved to only work on practical innovation projects and not write any reports. We caved in on this project, but that’s only because we’re convinced there’s a great story we want to share with others. We hope it provides the one per cent inspiration you’ve been looking for.
Disruptive Innovation competition results
Liz Evers, January 8th 2010, Innovation
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Back in October the Forum launched a competition for sets of our Disruptive Innovation Cards. Entrants were asked to tell us how they would use the cards to disrupt for sustainability. We had a really positive response with entries from as far afield as New Zealand, the US and Brazil.
After serious consideration we managed to whittle the entrants down to five winners, they are:
- Ed Kellow, LEAD International who will use the cards to train 150 LEAD Associates on sustainability, who in turn train people in 33 countries
- Ron Mader, Planeta.org who wants to translate the cards into Spanish and create an iphone/online application for them
- Michelle Thomasson who will use the cards with economic advisors and filming the process to disseminate online
- André Winter, Brazil who is organising a series of events in parallel to COP15
- Stuart Jones, PLATO: Sustain who will use the cards in work with 160 business leaders in South East England
All entrants will receive an electronic version of the cards too.
“We set up the competition as a little experiment to get ideas for developing and using the cards. We were delighted and surprised by the level of response and the range of ideas. Hopefully we will get valuable feedback from all those who entered and create a valuable tool” - Hugh Knowles, Principal Advisor
Innovation guru Clayton Christensen coined the term disruptive technology or innovation, as “that which improves a product or service in ways that the market does not expect”. The sustainable economy of the future depends on just such disruptions to move us away from current unsustainable technologies and business models at the pace we need.
At the Forum we’re always looking for innovative new ways to approach sustainability. The cards were developed to help innovators come up with game-changing, disruptive ideas - each one capturing a different method of thinking ‘outside the box’.
We’re keen to catalyse these disruptions for sustainability and we’re putting together plans for Disruptive Innovation in 2010 and beyond, and our set of 12 cards is a first step. We’ve started to use these internally, with our partners and for larger projects, and initial feedback suggests we’ve hit on something rather exciting!
Disruptive Innovation – competition now open
Chris Sherwin, October 29th 2009, General, Innovation
At Forum we’re always looking for innovative new ways to approach sustainability. We’ve just produced a tool to help innovators come up with game-changing, disruptive ideas, and are offering you the chance to win one too.
Our Disruptive Innovation cards each capture a different method of thinking ‘out of the box’ to inspire real change. You can win a set by telling us what you would do with them to disrupt for sustainability. The top five ideas will be featured here on our website and in Green Futures magazine.
I’ve been very lucky to oversee Forum’s team of innovators, working to help develop next generation of sustainable products and services with our partners. We’ve helped Dulux launch Ecosure, a high-quality paint with a greatly reduced carbon footprint, the launch of GreenHeart, the lower-impact phone range from Sony Ericsson and our i-team project used cutting-edge innovation techniques to help three UK local authorities develop low-carbon services.
The scale and pace of our emerging sustainability challenges has really ratcheted up in recent years. UK climate change targets alone have gone from 60% to 80% by 2050 with many calling for a 90% reduction in that same time frame. As a result, we’ve concluded that we no longer need ‘just innovation’ for sustainability, but disruption.
Innovation guru Clayton Christensen coined the term disruptive technology or innovation, as “that which improves a product or service in ways that the market does not expect” usually by new entrants overtaking incumbents. Examples include compact fluorescent’s overtaking incandescent light bulbs, the PC replacing typewriters, and digital overtaking print photography. They can also be innovative new partnerships like food conglomerate Danone teaming up with Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus to produce a low-cost, eco-dairy product, or companies gate-crashing another market like Google entering the energy sector.
The sustainable economy of the future depends on just such disruptions to move us away from current unsustainable technologies and business models at the pace we need.
Here at Forum, we’re keen to catalyse these disruptions for sustainability and we’re putting together plans for Disruptive Innovation in 2010 and beyond, and our set of 12 cards is a first step. We’ve started to use these internally, with our partners and for larger projects, and initial feedback suggests we’ve hit on something rather exciting! To continue to catalyse these disruptions we’ve decided to open a competition to encourage innovative sustainable thinking.
Competition entry details
Send 50 word max entries telling us what you would do with our Disruptive Innovation cards to disrupt for sustainability, to: h.knowles@forumforthefuture.org.uk by 30 November, 2009. We will select the 5 top entries that use our cards to create the most change and publish the winning entries in the next edition of Green Futures magazine and here on Forum’s website.
The future is flat
James Goodman, September 18th 2009, Futures, Innovation
What do crowd-sourcing, user-generated content and the microfinance revolution all have in common?
They’re all features of a trend that is moving power out beyond the control of centralised organisations, and into the hands of individuals.
This trend is nothing new – it’s as old as the internet - but it is becoming more and more important every day, eroding hierarchies and leading to flatter structures in business and the economy.
I was reminded of the trend recently when I joined the judging panel at a ‘hackathon ’ - a mammoth non-stop software programming competition to see who can come up with the best solution to a particular challenge. This one was the ‘ecomo’ (conflating ‘ecology’ and ‘mobility’), in which teams of enthusiasts worked through the night to come up with new, sustainable mobile applications.
The Ecomo hackathon was run by Vodafone. It’s a type of ‘open innovation’. The term – I’m told by Chris Sherwin, our in-house innovation guru – was coined by the US technologist Henry Chesbrough about six years ago. Up and coming creatives have a chance of fame and fortune and at the very least get to meet like-minded people. The hosts build credibility with an important set of stakeholders, and could get first dabs on the next big thing.
It’s a growing trend. IBM recently held an ‘innovation jam’ with 2000 students globally as part of their smarter planet programme. Electrolux have their Design Lab, connecting with students to design the products of the future. And Unilever was a sponsor of RSA’s Design Directions, in which design students came up with products using some of our own future scenarios. Companies are even sponsoring user-generated advertising.
The winner of the hackathon, from a team called The Wizards of the Digital Frontier, was a canny spin on the freecycle phenomenon – itself another manifestation of the flattening trend. Freecyle websites match up people who want something with people who have that something to give away for free. There are many different, but similar, services, most voluntary and most operating at a local scale.
It’s a simple idea that helps people save money and reduce waste, but it’s yet to reach the scale of an eBay or Facebook. Part of the problem is the need to sign up to multiple networks and continually check them to see if they have something you want. It’s time consuming and, because most operate on a ‘first come first served’ basis, it’s very easy to miss out.
The Wizards’ idea was to aggregate the data from all of the freecycle-type websites, so that instead of signing up to every service, you just go to one website, plug in, say, ‘sofa’ and your postcode and if there’s a decent sofa to be had, it’s yours. Better, if there’s nothing available when you check, it will text or email you when something suitable does come up.
The idea won because it identified a simple problem with an existing service and came up with an elegant solution. It could help the freecycle movement go from niche to mass-market, and have a real impact on sustainability. There’s no guarantee that Vodafone will take the idea any further. But I’m sure we’ll see its like on the web pretty soon.
Who knows how far could the open innovation trend will go? We could very soon see it replacing more traditional closed-door corporate R&D completely. With an optimist’s view of the future, this could lead to more sustainable innovation that fits better with meeting people’s needs, rather than creating new wants. Products and services designed by the people, for the people…? A new form of democratic consumerism…?
By the way, Forum set up something similar to this back in the heady days of the dotcom boom, with the thinktank Demos (Vitamin-e anyone?). Perhaps it’s time to revive it.
Talk is cheap
James Taplin, July 2nd 2009, Innovation
In the beginning was the word, and it was chattered from the treetops, chanted in the darkness of smoky caves, sung across the plains and dripped poisonously into ears. It was a stentorian bark across the battlefield, a sensual whisper in the moonlight, and a gasp of new life . . .
And then Mr Watson was summoned for his chat, and everything changed. It’s not that all those things above no longer happened, it’s rather that with the coming of the telephone they happened more, plus louder, faster and, crucially, further than ever before.
Words and communication are what our society is built upon and, generally, the better you are at communicating, the more successful you are. Equally, this human need to talk continues to drive innovation, generating huge sums of money or prestige for those who find ways to make it cheaper, better, and more convenient.
It’s little wonder, therefore, that the mobile phone has rapidly gone from being a heavy ostentatious symbol of decadence for people with sports cars, into the third essential item that no-one leaves home without – Keys? Wallet? Phone? (and even that hierarchy is being eroded).
And the service providers have been there guiding and nurturing us throughout. They let us throw our voices down their networks, and have introduced us to new ways of communicating by text and picture (transforming the ways we think, and our language in the process).
But, as lovely as they are, none of this has happened for free (especially over really long distances), and since the word is too powerful to be constrained by the barrier of cost, it’s inevitable that it should have eventually found a cheaper outlet – currently the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).
Skype was the first to take the VoIP concept and turn it into something truly useful and usable. It is now used by millions of users around the world to speak (and videoconference) easily and cheaply via the internet.
This trend is set to continue with Google Voice which allows users to link their many work/home/personal numbers together under one Google Voice number, and do all manner of ‘cool things’ with it (like seamless switching of calls mid-conversation, for example from landline to mobile so you can take your office conversation out to lunch, or from one mobile to another if the first battery is about to die). Most worryingly for the networks, however, is that calls to and from the Google Voice number are also likely to be free.
So, given that service providers are frequently little more than data pipes for transporting the word, and given that we're seeing the rapid development of virtually free pipes (soon to be made more ubiquitous in the UK with the government's aspirations of broadband for all, funded by the new tax), what role is there left for them?
3 has been the first to respond to the VoIP threat by embracing it. After all, “if you can't beat 'em . . .” It is currently the only network to offer free Skype calls from its handsets, meaning customers can use their phones without paying 3 anything at all (even on pay-as-you-go phones for which you theoretically never need to buy a top-up). Others, like O2, are transforming themselves into a lifestyle choice and offering services beyond basic communications – witness its drive to create the O2 experience (spearheaded by the O2 arena), and the launch of the new family organiser, the joggler.
Interesting news from Vodafone and T-mobile, on the other hand, is that they are looking at femtocells – home wireless points that connect a user’s mobile phone with their broadband network. These not only provide the homeowner with flawless mobile connectivity at home (without the need for the network to provide costly main masts), but their integration with home broadband must surely mean that a VoIP offering is also on the way.
So what next? The word will out, by whatever means necessary, and whilst it’s too simple to say that they need to diversify or die, the networks do need to innovate and become more responsive to the needs of their users (something which, historically, hasn’t always unduly troubled them).
One thing is clear, as time goes on, speech really will be freer than ever before.
Cutting carbon with smart finance
Will Dawson, June 19th 2009, Finance, Innovation
Smart, efficient finance has huge potential to help public sector organisations cut their carbon footprint cost-effectively, so it’s surprising it’s so little used at a time when budgets are under pressure.
We’ve set out to help councils and other public bodies meet their carbon targets for less money, and today we publish Smarter finance: how to get more carbon savings for your cash. This report shows how smarter ways of raising and using finance – like revolving funds and services companies – can make money go further, saving both carbon and cash.
We’ve gathered rare examples of pioneering initiatives from as far afield as Lithuania – where groups of tenants club together to fund energy efficiency measures – and we now know what is special and worth repeating.
For instance, Kirklees’ Re-Charge scheme loans householders money to install low-carbon technologies in their property, such as solar panels to heat water. It is successful because there are no interest charges and the money does not have to be repaid until the property is sold. The council only has to subsidise the interest on the loans and this costs around three times less per home than using a grant scheme.
In parts of Milton Keynes developers pay a levy into a fund to offset the carbon emissions from the use of new properties. The money is spent on local schemes such as insulating older homes which are much less energy efficient. It works because it is cheaper to save carbon in older homes than make new homes carbon neutral and it raises capital from the developers.
Perhaps most famous of all is Woking Borough Council and its service company, Thameswey Energy Ltd. Thameswey installs combined heat and power plants which supply heating and electricity to households, businesses and council buildings in the centre of Woking. It used just £38,000 of council funds to borrow £1 million from private investors. The story has been widely celebrated, yet there are few other councils establishing service companies.
Rather than wondering why Thameswey isn’t being copied elsewhere, we wanted to identify the replicable ingredients which allowed Woking to take this bold step in the first place. The answer is of value to all public sector organisations – it’s because the council leaders and executives actively supported innovation.
The most important lesson from Woking isn’t the technicalities of establishing a private CHP network, it’s that top-level leadership, which encourages staff to be inventive and take risks, can lead to exceptional, progressive solutions. Of course, thorough research, risk management and feasibility analysis are important too, but this release from the bureaucratic leash is a vital and, until now, overlooked success factor for smarter finance and cost-effective carbon savings.
We have used many more practical insights like these to develop ten success factors for getting smarter with finance, and a staged process for developing new initiatives which we'll use to work with public sector organisations as part of our Climate Finance project.
I’ve seen first-hand, whilst working in the European Commission, how creativity can be stifled by hierarchy and procedures. So when we launched Climate Finance at the Corporation of London earlier this year, I was delighted to see that UK public servants have such free-flowing enthusiasm, passion and creativity. After barely an hour of our ‘fantasy finance’ game we had developed new financial models to save carbon. These included a new service company which supplied water, heat and electricity to the NHS and invested in energy savings and generation across its estate, and a trading scheme for waste. The winner was a community-run social enterprise which generated energy locally and used the profits to provide insulation to households.
Many who joined us that day said that having a broad range of expertise in the groups was the catalyst to the success. This is why we are offering interested public sector organisations the opportunity to work with our advisory group to help them create schemes like this for real.
The public sector faces the prospect of a cash-starved decade, yet carbon reduction targets will stiffen. This recession is the opportunity to move from grant to pay-as-you-save schemes which generate returns. This sort of smarter finance is our solution and this report is a practical guide to making it happen.
In the future, public income will be as important as expenditure when it comes to funding carbon savings. “Cash out – cash in”, is the new way to save carbon.
Designing a sustainable future
John Thackara, May 11th 2009, Innovation
What products and services will we encounter in a sustainable future - in, say, 15 years from now?
This question was posed to design students right across the UK in a competition called 'A Changing World: products and services for a sustainable future'. Its winners have just been announced and their submissions are now available to view on an online exhibition.
The competition, part of the annual award scheme Design Directions was organised by the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce) and sponsored by Forum for the Future, Unilever and AkzoNobel.
Design students were challenged to imagine the world in 2025, and to develop product-service proposals for two markets: Personal Care, and Surface Covering. They were given a briefing document, prepared by Forum for the Future, that described an extremely challenging environment.
By 2025, the students were told, water supplies would be in crisis; oil would be in short supply and very expensive; the UK would have a much older population; global food harvests would be oscillating wildly from year to year as unpredictable and unseasonal weather took its toll; China and India would have displaced ‘the West’ as the main centre of influence of the world; and so on.
Not exactly business-as-usual, then.
The competition's overall winner was Laura Morris, from Northumbria University. She received a Wally Olins Opportunity Award of £2,500 for ‘Locally Pure’, a hair care 'product service system'.
The product itself consists of a big droplet of solid shampoo; note, no ecologically unsound plastic bottle. The droplet is packaged in an abrasive foaming mitt. Local communities are shown how to make the shampoo by a representative from Unilever.
What local groups buy is access to a starter kit comprising base ingredients and recipes, with further optional equipment. Locally Pure is then made communally. Locally-sourced ingredients, such as honey, or herbs, are added to the base soap. The shampoo is sold locally and can be traded between rural towns – but none of its ingredients come from a distant foreign factory.
Laura’s second design proposal was for a product-service called ‘Palette’ – a system that enables people quickly and easily to change the colour or design of their walls. The Palette eliminates the need for environmentally unsound liquid paint.
Colours and patterns are selected on the Dulux website, and the customer pays for them to be made into ‘Colour Chips’ – small glass panels containing a coloured insert. The Chips arrive in minimal reusable packaging; unwanted Chips can be returned to be recycled and receive a discount on future purchases.
When a Colour Chip is placed into the ceramic Palette, the wall instantly changes colour to match the Chip. More Chips can be added to mix and layer the colours and patterns. The Palette uses radio frequency identification tags to identify colours within the Chip and sends a signal wirelessly to electronic E-ink wall hangings.
Joe Harrison, a student at The Arts Institute at Bournemouth, was the competition’s second winner with a Wally Olins Opportunity Award of £1,000. His project, ‘Digital Growth’ was a surface covering concept for 2025.
Joe's system combines nature and technology to create a dynamically changing ‘digital plant’ that grows in homes and develops uniquely in relation to the occupier’s energy consumption. The plant changes shape and colour depending on the efficiency of the appliances around the home.
The concept in Digital Growth is not unique; two media artists, Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau, caused a stir in 1992 with an installation at Karlsruhe Media Centre in Germany that featured growing interactive plants.
What the jury liked about Joe’s project was its focus on energy behaviour in the home. The growth rate, colour and shape of the plant are directly linked to the efficiency and lifestyle of its residents. It therefore acts as a monitor of energy consumption at a time when minimising energy costs has become essential.
Joe explained that Digital Growth works by taking data (using wireless communications) from different appliances; it converts these data into a visual format on a section of electronic wallpaper. Water and electricity usage, and the efficiency of particular appliances, affect how the plant will look. Each leaf represents a different appliance; its stems represent water, gas and electricity.
Digital Growth copies patterns of plant growth and mimics how healthy or dying plants behave. Brown and drooping leaves indicate low efficiency; when they appear, the user can find out what is causing this using touch screen technology in areas of the digital plant to get detailed pop up information.
The RSA jury comprised: John Thackara, director of Doors of Perception (chair); Fiona Bennie, senior sustainability advisor at Forum for the Future; Dr James Taplin, Principal Sustainability Advisor, Forum for the Future; Bob Crawford, Discovery Platform Director at Unilever R&D; Rob Holdway, Co-founder and Director of management consultants Giraffe; Jonathon Porritt, Founder Director of Forum for the Future and Chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission; and Dr Philip Taylor, a Paints Research Associate in the Global Research and Innovation Group of AkzoNobel Decorative Coatings.
John Thackara, who chaired the RSA jury, is a guest blogger. As Director of Doors of Perception, he connects together a worldwide network of paradigm-changing designers, media artists, and technology innovators. www.thackara.com
To read more about the competition and its winners, click here.
For further information, please contact Fiona Bennie, Senior Sustainability Advisor, Innovation.
Solar cooker wins climate change challenge
Shannon Carr-Shand, April 9th 2009, Climate change, Innovation
In the end it was the simplicity of a cheap solar cooking stove which captured the public’s imagination in the FT Climate Change Challenge – our global competition to find the best innovations to tackle climate change.
The Kyoto Box today won the first prize of $75,000, sponsored by technology giant HP. This will allow it to conduct mass trials of the technology in 10 countries, including South Africa, India and Indonesia. You can read more about it here.
This announcement is the culmination of a five-month search to find and reward the most innovative solutions to climate change. The final shortlist, selected by our panel of business leaders and climate change experts, reflects the many levels on which business and civil society need to take action to address climate change.
Our finalists offered ways to reduce new emissions from agriculture, transportation and air conditioning – all critical areas when you consider the Stern Review estimates that agriculture is responsible for 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the transport sector 14%, and buildings 8%.
At the other end of the spectrum, another of our finalists, Carbonscape, proposes to reduce current atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases, offering an efficient method of fixing carbon dioxide in wood and other organic material as charcoal which can be locked away.
It is heartening to see that the entries drew inspiration from across the scientific world – from biomimicry to the laws of thermal dynamics.
History tells us that new innovation can flourish in an economic downturn as a renewed focus on the competitive edge creates the space for innovators to put their theories into practice. This may be true, but to develop innovations that tackle climate change and are commensurate with the scale of this challenge will require focused financial support. Existing and new technologies will need to be commercialised if they are to reach the tipping point at which they can make a real contribution.
Over the course of the competition, approximately 23,000 people visited the challenge homepage – engaging in the debate on how innovation can tackle climate change, and getting an insight into the new markets that will be created in the move towards a low-carbon economy. With the need to reduce emissions growing ever more urgent, lets hope that this debate has inspired new innovators to focus on tackling climate change.
Read more about the competition and the winner.
Innovation in the public sector
Peter Madden, March 11th 2009, Innovation, Public Sector
Public sector innovation seems to be flavour of the month. I have just attended NESTA’s ‘Public Service Innovation Summit’, where Gordon Brown and two Cabinet Ministers turned up to issue an ‘invitation to innovation’.
In the past fortnight, Forum held two events on public sector innovation: Climate Finance – the launch of a project which will look at innovative low carbon financing in the public sector; and the i-team – which showed how local authorities can innovate to tackle climate change. And the Design Council is soon to launch a new programme called ‘Public Services by Design’.
So why the renewed interest in this topic? Public sector leaders have been talking about innovation for a number of years. But the agenda has been given added impetus by the likely impacts of the recession on public spending. Anyone who reads the papers will know that the public debt we are accumulating because of the economic downturn will lead to very deep cuts further down the line. After a decade in which lots of money was pumped into public services, the tap will be turned off.
But even though there’ll be less money, people are ever more demanding in what they expect from public services. And government targets – particularly on climate change - are getting ever tougher. So, the public sector faces higher public expectations, stronger targets, and less money.
The only way out of this crunch is to innovate in how we deliver public services.
Gordon Brown argued for exactly this and for a “leap forward to a low-carbon economy”. (He also, tantalisingly, trailed “big announcements to come on renewables, carbon capture and storage and efficiency in buildings”).
The danger, of course, is that innovation actually gets cut back because of spending pressures. Public sector bodies may focus on their core activities and stop funding the riskier stuff at the edges. To help counter this, NESTA has issued a call for 1% of all public spending to be earmarked for innovation. This is a target we should support.
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