Today's green technologies could learn a lot from Edison

Edison won through with his electric light bulb by creating pioneering practice and taking a systemic approach.

Technology and product innovation are key to a sustainable approach and also an important route to creating value from it. But how many times have you heard stories of great products that just haven't got traction in the market place? Or approaches that need behaviour change before they are really going to take off. All too often green innovations seem to fall foul of the system around them – be that financing, regulation, customer behaviour and/or wider culture.

Thomas Edison's experience of the electric light bulb can teach us a lot about how to create pioneering practice and really make it fly (three and four on Forum for the Future's Six Steps to Significant Change – creating pioneering practice and enabling it to tip into the mainstream, if you're following the series).

In the late 1870s there was a lot of innovation around electric light. Edison's light bulb might not have been the best or brightest, but because of his systemic approach it was the one that prevailed.

To replace kerosene lamps, Edison saw what he needed to do more than sell light bulbs – he had to fundamentally shift in the way that things were done. New infrastructure – transmission lines, generators and substations – were needed to deliver the necessary electricity, which meant new finance and licencing. At the same time customers had to want it. So he designed and piloted a whole system with his light bulb at the heart of it.

The first public demonstration of his incandescent light was Menlo Park, New York in December 1879, followed by a small scale generator in Pearl Street powering 59 homes in Lower Manhattan. It was no accident that he chose Manhattan for this pilot.

The houses were close together so it was easy to put in the electric infrastructure. But it was also just round the corner from Wall Street and close to the corridors of power. So when this new street was lit up – sparkling like a Christmas tree – it excited the bankers and regulators who had the money and influence to make it happen at scale. This pioneering practice not only showed the potential of electric light, it also was proof of concept of electricity distribution.

Edison is now credited with being as much a business man as an inventor. He looked beyond the technology to what would make it attractive to people; he worked out the economics and excited the bankers; he wooed politicians to get the right sort of licencing in place for this new vote winning solution. His focus on the consumer was to make electricity cost-competitive with kerosene. That meant adjusting his invention to use cheaper materials – boldly stating "we will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles".

So in addition to the gift of electrification (and not getting into the debate over Direct and Variable Current), Edison showed us that to get an idea to a tipping point you have to think more widely than the idea itself.

The ingredients that made his invention work are incredibly resonant for today's new green technologies and inventions. He combined a great idea, plus viable business model, plus enabling policy, plus consumer pull and cultural fit. At Forum for the Future we call this system innovation. If we are going to take new sustainable products and business models and ensure they deliver value for their businesses then we need to heed the Edison recipe for pioneering practice that considers the wider system.

This blog was originally published in Guardian Sustainable Business on 9 June 2011. Click here to read the blog in Guardian Sustainable Business.