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3 February 2012

Are smart phones now driving dematerialisation?

I have always been sceptical of the argument that multi-function devices like smart phones are eco-friendly by avoiding the need for a stack of equivalent individual devices (in this case MP3 players, digital cameras, wrist watches etc). I have an iPhone which did stop me purchasing a voice recorder for the interviews for The Green Executive (there was an app for that), but I already had an iPod, a digital compact camera, a watch etc, etc so the phone hasn't offset the purchases of those devices (although I am less likely to upgrade them in future).

But, for the younger generations at least, this now seems to be changing. They are increasingly living their lives around a single device. To take one example of the commercial impact of this, sales of point and click cameras were down a staggering 30% last year - a fall attributed to the use of camera phones, and no wonder - you take the picture, edit it and upload it to Facebook with just a few taps on that slick touchscreen. Even my dad has started reading the morning news on his phone, and  smart phones are said to be the guitar tuner of choice amongst the younger bands.

It is probably just old fogeys like me who have spent long enough in the analogue age to have accumulated so much electronic baggage. The younger generations do not need to have as much physical stuff as we did - whether cameras, magazines or stacks of CDs - and that can only be a good thing. It is also a trend which business needs to take cognisance of - or they could end up in the same dire straits as Kodak.

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23 January 2012

What Kodak's demise tells us about cleantech

Poor Kodak. You couldn't make it up. A classic brand invents a great new technology (digital photography) but decides it would cannibalise their own products, so they ditch it. Someone else takes up the baton and they get eaten up anyway while desperately trying to claw back a piece of their action.

This isn't a new story - when transistors arrived on the market, the valve manufacturers decided not to embrace the new technology and paid the price - they've all gone. You could argue the same has happened to Zavvi and the struggling HMV - they're suffering at the hands of newer business models. The tragedy for Kodak is they weren't blindsided by someone's innovation, they had the ball and gave it away.

To my mind, Apple is one of the few examples of a major business which had its niche (desktop computers), then rode a wave of innovation and ended up dominating the new markets of mobile computing and digital media. But that took the particularly twisted genius of a certain S Jobs Esq.

So what's the lesson for Green Business in general and clean tech in particular?

Well you can see the same thing happening in the energy market. A while ago Big Oil redefined themselves as Energy Companies, invested in renewables, messed about with them for a while, then ditched them and headed for the familiar grounds of oil and (fracking) gas. They appeared fearful of commercialising technologies which might 'cannibalise' their traditional business, but if they don't do it someone else will. BP's "Beyond Petroleum Generation" of bright young things are almost all working for cleantech start ups now. I'm sure most of them would want to crush their former employer in the energy marketplace.

The only thing that protects the traditional energy sector is the lack of true competition in the market, but, with the UK Government trying to break the near-monopoly of electricity producers and introducing the carbon floor price, those advantages might be starting to slip away. If I were a fossil fuel based company, the Kodak story would make me very worried indeed.

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20 January 2012

There's no such thing as too much renewable energy

There were stories in the press this month about £1.2m worth of 'constraint payments' made to Scottish wind farms over Christmas to not generate electricity when demand was low. These stories appear to have been placed by dodgy "think tanks" (read: propaganda machines) protesting about public subsidies going to renewables.

And I agree with them.

Sort of.

It is madness to pay to restrain renewable energy. We need as much renewable energy as we can get (here I diverge sharply from the propagandists), so what on earth are we doing saying "not now! take some cash"?

The money would be much better invested in smart grid technology and storage facilities. In a smart energy world such "excess" renewable energy would be used to cheaply charge electric vehicles and portable devices as well as distributed storage systems.

The problem is our thinking hasn't got past that of the 1930s. The grid we plug wind turbines into in the UK hasn't changed much since 1938. 1938! That grid was designed to distribute electricity from centralised power stations - a bit like television channels broadcast the same entertainment to lots of people. A sustainable energy system would be more like the internet than TV with energy entering, being stored, and accessed at different places and times by a wide variety of players. It's about time we brought energy into the internet age.

The wider point is our tendency to be hidebound by linear, incremental thinking - to innovate to the degree to tackle the sustainability challenge, we need to break free of business as usual.

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23 November 2011

Need Sustainability Inspiration? Don't Operate in a Vacuum.

When James Dyson invented the bagless vacuum cleaner, the idea didn't come out of thin air. Famously he saw a vortex system for capturing dust at a sawmill and realised it could revolutionise the vacuum cleaner market. From wood cutting to domestic cleaning - the same basic principle could be applied to both.

Most innovation is like this - very few ideas are 'new', but are 'borrowed' from other applications. Sustainability is no exception - ideas cross sectoral boundaries and there is the whole fascinating field of biomimicry which borrows from nature (why use poisonous ship anti-fouling if you can copy how shark skin does it?).

This is one reason why I don't specialise in a particular market - my clients cover transport, chemicals, defence, broadcasting, construction, engineering, health, waste, nature conservation and local government to name a few - because much of the value I bring to those clients is cross-pollinating ideas.

So, if you're looking for inspiration, don't just look inside your company, or what your competitors are doing, but be curious and look further afield. You never know where the next idea might come from.

 

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18 November 2011

Creativity and Sustainability

In my book The Green Executive, I concluded that three personal qualities were required of green business leaders: resilience, a bias to action and enthusiasm. Since the book was published back in May, I've interacted with several hundred employees of different clients from widely different roles and backgrounds and I'm starting to see an important fourth quality emerge: creativity.

Why have I spotted it now and not earlier? Well, firstly I am doing more workshops than ever and secondly my workshops have evolved to become less and less about me talking and more and more about the delegates thinking. And you can clearly tell the creative types in the room: some people struggle to break away from the realities of their day to day activities, but others relish the opportunity to step back and be curious, letting their mind take them on a journey of discovery.

Watching a truly creative person at work can be quite extraordinary. I've seen two people who have no background in sustainability propose the rather advanced concept of product-service systems as a sustainability solution within a 20 minute exercise - working it out from first principles. I've found a simple discussion on sustainability touch on the second law of thermodynamics (I usually avoid the thermodynamic argument as too philosophical in an hour's workshop). And I've seen people bring in ideas from completely different fields of endeavour and apply them inventively to sustainability.

Breaking free from the 'tyranny of the present' is a prerequisite of sustainability - we're not going to achieve sustainability by doing the same thing, but a little bit greener. We need innovative, lateral thinking type solutions and those will inevitably come from creative minds. The challenge for organisations is how to identify, harness and nurture these creatives. The 'champion' route is one way, but make sure you make the role meaningful. Task groups are better when you have a particular issue to address as there is a clear objective and purpose.

Part of me is really jealous of these people, but more than that I love working with them. They challenge me, they stimulate me and they astound me. They certainly make my job a lot more interesting.

So let's hear it for the creatives!

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13 June 2011

The Rules of Green Business Start-ups

On Friday I was interviewed for a PhD project as an 'ecopreneur' and it got me mulling and chin scratching. If you are thinking of starting a green business, here's some key principles you should never forget:

1. Don't forget you are running a business: It is so easy some times to get evangelical about green business, but the underlying business model must be robust, or you will sink like a stone. No-one owes you a living just because you are green.

2. Hire good business people: It is much easier to teach sustainability principles to a good engineer, designer, salesperson or marketeer than it is to teach engineering, design, sales or marketing to a keen environmentalist.

3. Don't greenwash: As John Grant, author of the Green Marketing Manifesto, said "Green Marketing is about making green look normal, not about making normal look green."

4. Understand your market: many consumers still equate 'green' with poor performance and high price. You have to sell the 'sizzle' of green products eg the big benefit to consumers of water-based wall paint is not the fact it isn't as polluting as solvent-based paints, but that it is quick drying and doesn't stink your house out for weeks. You've got to compete on price, performance and planet.

5. Don't give up easily: it's a tough business to be in and resilience is the key to success. On the other hand, if you realise your great idea really is a turkey, you may have to 'pivot' the business around to another exploit a more profitable opportunity.

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4 March 2011

The Power of Good Design

It has been said that design is the engine room of good environmental practice and I couldn't agree more.

  • Got an inefficient building? Design a new one, or design a brilliant retrofit.
  • Got a problem with a toxic material in your manufacturing process? Design the need for it out of your product.
  • Got a problem in your supply chain? Either design that part of your supply chain out of your product, or re-design the supply chain itself.

When I say 'design' here, it doesn't just mean a expensively bespectacled 'creative' staring at a blank sheet of paper on a drawing board. What you might be redesigning is the way you approach problems, the tactics you use and the business environment you work in. Anyone can redesign, and the best person to ask is... everyone. Get creative juices running throughout your organisation and its stakeholders and you might just be surprised what new designs you end up with.

What are you going to redesign next?

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6 September 2010

What's the ultimate green product?

I started my professional sustainability career in eco-design - making the world greener from the drawing board. This remains the greatest opportunity for a business to go green as the designer has a huge amount of control over the whole lifecycle of the product from materials extraction right through to disposal.

During my two and a bit year investigation into eco-design techniques, I became fascinated by the Russian Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, or TRIZ to give it its Russian acronym. The concept behind TRIZ is that innovation does not come from sudden flashes of genius, but through the application of a number of fundamental principles. These can either be stumbled upon, or, by following TRIZ, worked through methodically until one generic solution fits the particular case. But what got me really excited about TRIZ was the concept of the ideal final result:

The ideal final result delivers the required function while consuming no resources.

Which would, by definition be the ultimate green product, as the product has been reduced to pure wieghtless function. Obviously this is impossible - even telling a joke requires some resources - but to me it is one of those intellectual concepts that provokes ambition and step changes. It is certainly behind the whole idea of servicisation - delivering the required function (eg travel via public transport and/or a car club) rather than a product (owning a car) and the whole digitisation movement (eg replacing travel with teleconferencing, or replacing CDs with MP3 downloads).

Unfortunately I never did secure the funding to develop a 'Green TRIZ' research project, but it would have been fascinating to either filter or generate a set of fundamental green design principles to be applied to get as close as possible to that ideal final result.

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28 June 2010

Fear of Failure: Soccer & Sustainability

Another World Cup, another round of disappointment, anger and dismay as a group of individually talented English players fail to play to their potential and crash out. As a non-Englishman living in England, my diagnosis is that the England team have always feared losing too much to play properly and then, paradoxically, they do lose. No-one ever seems to want the ball and, when they get it, they seem desperate to offload it asap, often in a square pass to a team-mate who is in a similar or worse position. All too often, those passes are hit without conviction and fall short, giving the opposition a clear run at goal.

Of course, fear of failure pervades much human endeavour. One of the key challenges in sustainability is dragging organisations away from the comfort blanket of 'business as usual'. Despite what they claim in their glossy corporate reports, few businesses are truly innovative when it comes to tackling their environmental performance. Going back to our football analogy, instead of firing long, raking passes into space on the wings to give their side forward momentum (as the German team did so beautifully yesterday), they knock the ball back and forward in a congested midfield until they lose it. Business as usual may feel safe, but as BP are finding out just at the minute, it eventually becomes a liability.

Within organisations, it is really hard to drag people away from what they know - people keep doing what they have been doing for decades, many manufacturing processes haven't changed fundamentally in a century and we get the same old same old. What we need of course, is a whole raft of disruptive innovation - approaches that redefine the way we do business or even live. Apple's iPad could have been a complete flop - it was an innovative product, fulfilling needs people didn't know they had, but Steve Jobs and his team of wizards are bold, talented and confident enough to make it work.

Are there businesses out there that will step up to the plate on sustainability, providing us with clean energy, new ways of working, new ways of flourishing within natural limits? Yes there are, and, without fear of failure, they will be the winners.

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5 February 2010

USBCell Bunny Viral

Simon Daniel of Moixa Energy, an old college compatriot of mine, has invented these cool USB rechargeable batteries. Moixa's viral video gives you a flavour...

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11 September 2009

Brrrm, brrrm (or not as the case may be...)


On Wednesday I was in Bedford at the Low Carbon Vehicle exhibition as part of the work we're doing with Innovation Scout to identify business opportunities in the low carbon economy. There was a real buzz about the place and some extraordinary vehicles including a hydrogen powered Morgan, and, getting most attention, the £87,000 electric sportscar, the Tesla. According to the nice lady on the stand, they've sold 1200 of these worldwide and are moving into profit.

I was working unfortunately and couldn't get a test drive. We were picking experts' brains to spot gaps in the market - OK if you're going to have electric cars, who is going to maintain them? Who provides the breakdown service? Who trains the emergency services in not getting an electric shock when they attend a road traffic accident involving an electric vehicle? While some experts could let this kind of idea flow freely, it was interesting how many found it difficult to think around their area of expertise. The conclusion was that there were dozens of opportunities around any one emerging technology for anyone with entrepreneurial spirit and, importantly, an inquisitive mind. Many of these are essential enabling products and services for the core product (the car).

Yesterday I interviewed Vic Morgan, founder of the Ethical Superstore for the Green Executive (my second book). His view is that if you take an ethical/green stance, you have to overcompensate with commercial attitude. He finds it easier to employ people with a passion for commerce and then interest them in the ethics later rather than the other way around.

Both these insights chime with the first secret of the Three Secrets of Green Business:

"Treat the environmental agenda as an opportunity, not a threat. Grasp it with both hands but, whatever you do, don’t forget you are still running a business."

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