Getting sustainable innovation into the heart of business
By Richard Miller, Head of Sustainability at the Technology Strategy Board - guest speaker at our Network event on 6th Dec: What does a sustainable economy look like and how do we get there?
Many business people are familiar with the idea of the Triple Bottom Line; the need to balance the needs of People, Planet and Profit in decision making. But being comfortable with the high level idea, does not tell you what to do about it. It does not naturally lead you to consider where innovation in product, service, process or business model will help you succeed. Where are the challenges for innovation? Which options have a viable future and which do not? You can understand the threat or opportunity of sustainability issues and still be left asking “but what do we do now?”
The Technology Strategy Board is the UK Government’s innovation agency, and our role is to help UK based business to be more successful through innovation. We support business in a number of ways, including investing in innovation projects. Over the last four years we have invested over £1bn in more than 2,000 projects involving 4,000 companies of all sizes. A key part of our vision is to “...apply technology rapidly, effectively and sustainably to create wealth and enhance quality of life.” About two-thirds of the projects we have funded have a significant sustainability objective, but we lacked any clear way of thinking about the sustainability issues and opportunities ourselves, and of helping the companies we work with to do the same.
Over the last 18 months we have been working with Forum for the Future to develop a model of a future sustainable economy. This is designed to help us to add a sustainability lens to the way we assess a market and innovation opportunity when considering an investment. Our objective is 9.5bn people living well with the resources of a single planet. Economic activities need to support that outcome, because that is where sustainable future profits will come from. But we don’t have complete freedom to innovate and act. There are biophysical planetary boundaries that limit what we can do, and socio-political foundations that need to be observed. Getting close to or breaching these boundaries increases the risk of business failure.
We identified 12 environmental boundaries and 10 social and political foundations. These ranged from limits on global warming and water use, to the interdependence of living systems and the need for a strong civil society. Thinking about these broad issues helps to tackle the question “is the market we are targeting sustainable in the long run, and are we approaching it with solutions that are likely to be sustainable?”
We are passionate about innovation, and believe that it is essential that business takes sustainability into account when visioning its future markets, products and services, and technologies. Unless sustainability is integrated into business thinking at all levels, it remains a ‘project’ or ‘initiative’ that is never really part of the heartbeat of the business. For us the Sustainable Economy Framework (SEF) will be successful if it enables business to see sustainability as a key consideration when formulating strategy and tactics, in order to establish businesses that can be successful and grow in future years.
The SEF can also help the Technology Strategy Board directly. We choose and invest in emerging technologies with high potential, and major market challenges. We develop strategies and investment plans with industry, government and academia. We need to fold sustainability issues and opportunities into those strategies, because that will help us identify what kind of innovation is required to ensure long-term viability. We will progressively integrate sustainability into all our decision making and investment planning alongside the more familiar criteria of market size and potential, UK technical and business capability, timeliness of investment and return to UK plc from public funds.
For further information regarding the Sustainable Economy Framework please click here.
Members of the Forum Network can find out more about the Framework, and hear more insights from Richard, at our 6th December Network event: The sustainable economy: what does it look like and how do we get there? Click here for more information.
Comments
From Nicky Conway:
Kate,
It’s great to see someone using the working title ‘The New Optimists Forum’. To keep plugging away in this field, I think you have to be optimist –to believe there’s a better way and it’s possible. That aside, your work about visioning a better place for food in Birmingham sounds very interesting. Food is one of Forum’s core priorities and we’ve worked with a lot of companies using futures to address a better future for the food system (e.g. with PepsiCo, Finlays, Consumer Futures etc). We also work with Birmingham City Council. Contact Dan Crossley to explore further cross overs.
We’re happy to share the draft framework with you – TSB will publish the final versions when they’ve been tested further. We’ve done work on various aspects of the impact of population growth, climate change and the food industry more generally – I’d recommend looking at our projects page. A few examples: Growing Pains, a report that aims to stimulate a debate by highlighting the massive challenges we face; Dairy 2020: a project examining what does a sustainable dairy industry look like, and what contribution can it make to a sustainable world. You might also be interested in Best Food Forward where we worked with NWSSP - Procurement Services (formerly Welsh Health Supplies) and Swansea University and took them through an innovation process to see how food can be procured in a more sustainable way, boost skills and support communities at the same time. Finally, Farming Futures is a multi-award winning climate change communications and behaviour change project in the agricultural and land management sector which has a series of factsheets and case studies.
Best,
Nicky
It's great that we're beginning to put the word "sustainable" next to "economy". It may be that economic growth is incompatible with us doing what needs to be done in meeting the huge challenges facing humanity — climate change, resource depletion and population.
These challenges all too often appear so overwhelmingly huge, hence we get stuck, not knowing what weas individuals should do or think or feel . . . And it's no surprise that socio-economic decisions and political decision-making is often hesitant.
Here in Birmingham, we've decided to bring these huge challenges better within our cognitive grasp by creating a series of scenarios about that very-tangible, utterly-vital stuff called food, about the very sociable, convivial matter called eating, and all within a particular very tangible geography — this city. The only (only!) huge cognitive stretch is 2050 . . . all this is year-long scenario planning exercise with scientists and socio-political decision-makers under the umbrella of The New Optimists Forum.
Our first event was last week, on 2nd November — there are reports about it at http://newoptimists.com/blog, and we'll be publishing more stuff as we collate and analyse what we have.
It'd be really great if we could mesh in somehow with what you're doing. Will you be publishing some of the models and mental tools you used that might help us go through this process? And will you be publishing any information about the possible impacts of climate change, resource depletion and population pressures on the economy of the UK?
And how can we help you?
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