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Full 85min Video Available On Demand - “Sustainability” isn’t just a nice thing to do. It’s a powerful source of business value, an organizing principle for strategy, and a remarkable driver of innovation at every level of the enterprise. And it’s all about design — of products and services, value propositions and contracts, buildings and production lines, marketing campaigns and incentive systems, and the daily conversations that are the life of your business.

Join Gil Friend, CEO of Natural Logic and author of the acclaimed The Truth About Green Business (FT Press), as he explores how your company can harness 3.85 billion years of R&D — and a commitment to a world that works — to drive innovation, profit and meaning.

Sustainable Brands Boot Camp –13 week online training series designed to teach professionals strategies for building business and brand value through sustainable innovation. Taught by leading experts, topics include market drivers, business model and product innovation, supply chain partnerships, brand strategy and marketing, metrics, and more. Available live and on-demand. Find out more: http://bit.ly/sbbootcamp

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Janine Benyus, author of the book “Biomimicry”, speaks extensively about the topic in this great presentation.

Earlier this year I bought myself a copy of John Thackara’s “In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World”, to get a glimpse of what this designer/futurist had to say about sustainability and society. While published in 2005, the content didn’t seem a bit dated as some business and trend books usually do. In many regards, I’d compare the book to “Natural Capitalism” for its contributions of highlighting social/environmental issues and solutions. But what Thackara also does is mix in storytelling, history, trends, potential future scenarios, philosophy, and criticism in such a manner that gives the reader a circular view of what’s going on, without placing heavy emphasis on normative ideas.

Many times in my book reviews I go through the various chapters, highlighting the main points. That hasn’t been easy with this book as it relates to many subjects, some of which readers will already be familiar with and for which further detail won’t be necessary. So at times my writing will more take the form of notes, rather than flowing editorial.

Lightness

Reference to physical weight reduction for process-related energy expenditures (and by that token carbon footprint); systems thinking; adequate provision, consumption, and replenishment of five capitals (natural, social, human, manufactured, financial); eco-efficiency principles of natural capitalism; low material/energy intense solutions; service design instead of ownership; design for easier disassembly leading to increased chance of up/recycling.

Speed

Increased consumption rates are associated with faster-paced, more dynamic lifestyles. The big issue is acceleration. Speed isn’t free. Eco-efficiency gains need to be balanced out in future innovations developed for the same end results. Previously, society operated much more on event/personal time (kairos) versus clock/public time (chronos). Religious calendars had periods of slowness (like Lent, Advent, Ramadan) for a reason. For improved lives, we need to move from real-time to more quality time. Trend examples: slow food, slow cities. Thankfully we tend to live slower as we get older, and with time more people are becoming 50+. Another trend is downshifting life (less money but more flexible time for quality living). The early internet theory of disintermediation’s mass effect on economics and transactions guided by techno invisible hand not entirely true. Trust and social interaction/relationships are still highly important. The telephone is still a very fast and time-effective means of conducting business and developing relations. Japanese word for trust cultivation: Nemawashi - laying the groundwork; process by which groups in Japan develop the shared understanding without which nothing much gets done. “If trust is established it takes  less effort to reach a consensus in regard to any issue.” Trust can’t be digitized.

“Acceleration weighs us down. Always on means seldom free. But the design challenge now is not to design slow systems to replace fast ones…but to enable situations that support an infinite variety of fast and slow moves - at a rhythm dictated by us, not by the system.”

Mobility

Car use versus trains/planes is high. Consider the quantity and quality of time spent in mobility. Actual time = transport + transaction/maintenance time. Logistics is the lifeblood of living operations. While going from Make-to-Build to Make-to-Order and RFID (radio frequency identification) have improved systemic efficiency, large supply networks also have costs in energy (carbon footprint) and materials (packaging/other) from transport and 3rd party warehousing. Solution ideas: 1) Think more, drive less, intermodal transport 2) Substitution; telepresence (like web conferencing) is good, although imperfect for social reasons 3) Move from faster to closer.

Locality

Networked & diverse cities/regions are more resilient and able to take care of their economic and food needs as conditions change.

Situation

Work and living spaces need to be better designed (physically and spiritually) for higher qualities of life.

Conviviality

While the dictionary meaning is “Fond of feasting, drinking, and good company”, John talks in broader terms of human health (physical and social). Solution examples include improved health care systems, barter/noncash trading exchanges, and connected communities of practice/interest. While not mentioned, some of these solutions have come to see the light of day through enabling technology including Freecycle, Craigslist, Meetup.com, Upcoming.org, Tweetups, and the like. For examples of cultural aspects we should consider retaining or designing for, see cultural universals as discussed by George Murdock, among others.

Learning

Too much content; little time to think. “Learning is about the acquisition of new skills, including social ones - not just stockpiling of facts.” eLearning’s history has seen its hype, failures, and re-considered potential. Although to be viable for users, tech support is critical. Increasingly there are shared learning opportunities in corporate/organizational education through wikis and other (social) knowledge management systems. Personal interaction remains important though as part of the learning process, in addition to flexible time management. “New geographies of learning need to be based on redesigned configurations of space, place, and network that respect the social and collaborative nature of learning - while still exploiting the dynamic potential of networked collaboration. We need to design the spatial configuration of education so that it connects communities and learners that, right now, tend to be separated from one another.” Also important are the role that projects play in learning to construct and collaborate; students should help design them too, not just be dictated by the teacher or syllabus. “Technology becomes interesting when it facilitates new kinds of interaction among teachers, students, and the external world - and this does not need to be expensive. To get the most out of technology and networks, new skills and attitudes are needed - and these either are free or can be taught.” These include search & evaluation skills, learning how to be found and how to link, editing, communicating, and organizing all kinds of digital media. Different ways to share & experience knowledge. Assessment (self and guided). Mentors. Mass collaborative learning, wikis. Property rights and commons. Playtime and games; effect of modeling and simulation upon learning.

Literacy

Info overload isn’t the problem. “It’s the unfiltered, unsorted, and unframed…lacking mechanisms to select what’s important. Design task is to make information digestable.”

Smartness

Thackara’s law: “If you put smart technology into a pointless product, the result will be a stupid product.” Law of diminishing amazement (LODA), “The more fancy tech you pack into a product, the harder it becomes to impress people with its benefits.” John goes on to talk about the silliness of some “smart appliance” concepts, and goes on to extol biomimicry. The most important property of future materials is Lightness (to make, to operate/use, to recover, to recycle). Goes on to discuss how advanced sensors and computing yield adaptations to changing conditions in systems. Yet with pervasive computing, people will always be smarter because complex calculations can’t always take ALL variables into account. Personal example: internet ads can sometimes be highly irrelevant and sometimes disrespectful because circumstantial and contextual information is unavailable for conditional logic. HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) design is difficult and can often reduce UX (user experience) satisfaction for a significant percentage of people, if personal interaction options are completely taken away.

“The transition to a light and sustainable economy means moving from an economy of transactions - selling and buying things - to an economy in which the quality of services, not the acquisition of goods, becomes our measure of well-being.” John questions the viability of techno-dependent, ambient intelligent future. Quotes from James Woudhuysen, former manager of research for Philips, “in new technology, systems are more prone to being incompatible than to matching up with each other.”

Flow

John ends the book with the following seven transition frameworks:

1) Blueprint and Plan to Sense and Respond

“Being responsive to events in a context and being able to respond quickly and appropriately when reality changes. This implies that we develop an understanding and sensitivity to the morphology of systems, their dynamics, their “intelligence”- how they work and what stimulates them.” Desired outcomes aren’t static. By understanding why a system is in one state, we can explore the kind of interventions that would nudge it into another more desirable one. This means designing as steering. From thinking of ourselves as authors of a finished work, toward facilitators to help people act more intelligently, in a more design-minded way, in the systems we all live in. Going from designing on the world versus designing in the world. Design in such a framework becomes a process of continuous observation, measurement, and feedback.

2) From High Concept to Deep Context

“Small changes to interconnecting subsystems can make things better, but they can also make things worse. This is why the application of “high-concept” design to contexts we barely understand is irresponsible and probably counterproductive.” Systems are complex; we need to appreciate that and design our man-made ones in that we act lightly, sense feedback, and act again.

3) From Top-Down Design to Seeding Edge Effects

Interconnectedness and the ability for small changes to occur from within -> Dexterity. “To find out what’s happening on the edge, we first need good peripheral vision.” We need to spot opportunities at the juncture between industries; to imagine relationships and connections where none existed before; above all, we need to look in new places for inspiration, because most solutions will involve new alliances and new connections.

4) From Blank Sheets of Paper to Smart Recombination

We need to reuse and recombine actors, ideas, and organizations. The challenge is to innovate by learning from the world.

5) From Science Fiction to Social Fiction

Enhance daily life. The important point when envisioning scenarios of human activity is to distinguish explicitly between what Ezio Manzini calls disabling and enabling solutions. Human interaction is important. Service design sweet spots occur at intersection of latent social needs, open systems, smart consumers, and smart companies.

6) From Designing For to Designing With

Collaborative design, ethnographic research, user-centered design, open innovation, and agile development.

7) From Design as a Product to Design as a Service

And that about does it for today. John’s book is 226 pages and is a worthwhile read for its philosophical inquiries.

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Founder and Director, Zero Emissions Research Institute, Gunter Pauli gives a great presentation on how nature can provide us the path to a world where green chemistry doesn’t just do no harm, but enables radical innovation opportunities; where waste is fed into closed loop systems that maximize social and environmental benefits; and where biomimicry enables us to free ourselves from toxic, complicated current solutions.

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“The Dow Chemical Company plans to work with Algenol Biofuels, Inc. to build and operate a pilot-scale algae-based integrated biorefinery that will convert CO2 into ethanol. This is one of many examples that demonstrates Dow’s commitment to develop new solutions to address the challenges of energy and climate change.”

Interesting video by Dow on the innovative activities they’re pursuing. What I totally love is how they’re using YouTube as a public relations tool to take their message beyond a lame press release. Well done, although they could have added more tags to the description like algae, ethanol, innovation, and energy.

Sustainability is a vast field covering multiple topics in operations, marketing, design, innovation, and new business models. While articles, books, and conferences (if you have the budget and time to attend) can be great, nothing beats having professionals giving you the inside scoop.

The creators of the Sustainable Brands Conference, with whom I work as their community engagement manager, are organizing an online training seminar for 13 weeks. In order to help further this movement along, we’ve recognized many smart business people need to get up to speed - and we’ve done so by getting some of the world’s leading practitioners to teach the subjects they’re passionate about for 90min - available live and on-demand for a very affordable price.

If you’d like to learn more, go ahead and check out the speakers, session descriptions, and dates here. I’ve included the titles of the sessions here for you to see. P.S. - I’ll be speaking on the last session in February on public relations and social media

1. Introduction to Opportunities in Sustainable Innovation
2. Innovation Opportunities in Response to Today’s Environmental Hot Buttons: Climate Change, Water & Waste
3. The Changing Consumer Marketplace
4. Organizational Models for Integrating CSR with Brands
5. Building a Balanced Sustainable Brand Strategy
6. Sustainable Product Design – An Overview of Prevailing Approaches
7. Building Collaborative Supply Chain Partnerships
8. Transforming Your Company Through Sustainability – and Engaging Your Customers and Employees in the Process
9. Introduction to Life Cycle Impact Assessment
10. Business Metrics: Dashboards, KPI’s and other strategies for Goal Setting and Measurement
11. Building Credibility/Avoiding Greenwashing
12. Designing Communications that Resonate
13. PR/Social Media and Alternate Community Building Strategies

Neat demonstration by Rob Cohee of Autodesk on using Sustainable Minds LCA software for making environmental impact assessments of a wine bottle opener, using Okala data scores.

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Andrew Dent is Vice-President at Material ConneXion, a research consultancy focusing on materials innovation and knowledge. In this speech for Design Green Now, he covers biopolymers, advances in natural materials, and better recycling among other topics.

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See also Andrew’s series of slides and explanations on various materials at BusinessWeek.

Alex Osterwalder is one smart cookie and co-author of a collaborative book I pre-ordered called Business Model Generation. In this slideshow presentation below, he gives a few examples of business models based on social/environmental welfare. The process of mapping a potential business model and the various interrelationships therein is quite valuable.

The new challenge that ambitious entrepreneurs are facing appears to involve a variety of factors including creative sourcing, service partnering, financing, franchising, and value innovation. Here’s the show:

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- via The Business Model Database Blog

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Having read Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and “…Solution” in the last few years, I found the innovation model he presented with historical examples and best practices to be quite useful in understanding markets, innovation cycles, competitiveness, and future scenarios. So I came across a video created by a gentleman named Jeff Monday, who describes the disruptive innovation model with a few additional thoughts of his own. Since he did a fairly good job, I thought I’d share it here with you.