Disruptive Innovation – competition now open

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 detailsSend 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.