Sustainability & Innovation
From David’s Desk: How introducing the 4R model goes beyond the traditional reduce, reuse, and recycle approaches
Innovation has many definitions - but one that I’ve always liked goes like this: “true innovation is bringing an idea to the discipline of the market”. It’s powerful because it conveys that innovation goes way beyond just having ideas. Innovations need to be both implemented AND offered to potential customers / users in the real-world. IF they see value in what is offered, they will be willing to exchange value (invest) to access and use an innovation.
Sustainability is an area ripe for innovation. Many early efforts around sustainability focused on reducing waste (“reduce”, “re-use”, “recycle”), and not enough on finding new opportunities for growth. By explicitly linking sustainability to innovation, we can reframe the conversation, changing it from one about scarcity (“do more with less”) to one about creating abundance (“do differently, to create new resources”).
If innovation is to play a big part in finding solutions to our global sustainability challenges, then we all need to get better quickly at this special type of innovation that will yield the real sustainability benefits and improvements that our planet and society so desperately need at this time.
Innovation of the sustainability function encompasses a wide range of initiatives, from developing eco-friendly products and services to optimizing resource efficiency and embracing circular economy principles. One notable example is Unilever, a global consumer goods company that has successfully integrated sustainability into its business model through its Sustainable Living Plan. By 2021, Unilever's sustainable living brands, which meet specific environmental and social criteria, accounted for 78% of the company's total sales and grew 69% faster than the rest of the business.
Our strategic alliance partners at Innovation 360 Group, working with deep subject matter experts like Peet van Biljon have developed powerful frameworks and methodologies to do this, collectively termed ‘Sustainnovation’.
Sustainability-Oriented innovation (SOI) – also called green innovation or eco-innovation – is any innovation undertaken for either the primary or secondary purpose of achieving environmental-sustainability benefits. SOI includes innovations undertaken to lower resource or energy consumption, lower GHG emissions or other forms of pollution - and also innovations that help to implement circular or regenerative business models, protect biodiversity, etc.
A key insight from their work is the “4R” model, which introduces a powerful concept: that organizations & people can go beyond the original Reduce, Re-use, Recycle approaches, and move towards a new approach: Regenerating resources. This is elegantly described in the chart below:
What makes this exciting for me is that it challenges organizations and leaders to apply the principles of innovation to sustainability issues. At a deeper level, it's about applying the concepts of radical innovation (to generate new business value from sustainability challenges), and not only doing incremental innovation (which has been used to reduce waste and optimize processes).
There is much more to say about this, and a lot of depth and nuance in the Sustainnovation methodologies - which we will cover in future newsletters and updates. But the key message is that the mindset and tools of ‘real innovation’ can be applied to the challenges of sustainability.
Real innovation - bringing ideas to the discipline of the market - will unlock new opportunities for companies and people to create positive economic benefit by helping to transform sustainability problem-solving from being about following rules and minimizing costs, to being about creating new solutions and maximizing business value.
Best regards,
Principal, Ulysses Partners