Working from home can get a bit lonely – the silence can be deafening at times. If I’m working on something I need to concentrate on, I’ll put on some music. If I’m wading through admin or other grunt work, I’ll have a podcast playing and will tune in and out. Yesterday, an advert appeared before one of my favourite podcasts (an economics one) that caught my attention and made me cheer.

Aviva were announcing that their insurance for electric vehicles now included emergency charging if your EV runs out of charge. ‘Range anxiety’ is a well known, if somewhat over-egged, mental barrier to EV uptake, and here’s Aviva reacting to that problem by saying “don’t worry, we’ve got your back.” I expect other insurance providers will follow.

I love it when businesses turn a problem into a business opportunity – marketeers always tell us to find our customer’s pain and address that. I had Marga Hoek, author of The Trillion Dollar Shift on the pod a couple of weeks ago and this is her mantra – see the Sustainable Development Goals as the massive opportunity they are.

I’m starting to notice more and more of these subtle changes – have you seen energy companies offering you free electricity at the weekend if you avoid consumption at peak times? We’ll be explaining the reasoning and the technology behind that (and much more) on the pod next week (it’s a fantastic episode, make sure you subscribe – links to Apple or Spotify), but in short, those companies are incentivising consumers to behave in a way that better matches a grid powered by renewables by smoothing out peaks and troughs in demand.

On of my favourite case studies of this mental shift inevitably involves on of my past clients, Interface. Faced with a substantial bill for a large solar array and struggling to make the sums add up, Interface realised that it would cover the cradle-to-gate energy demand of the carpets made in that factory. So they installed the array and rebranded the product of that factory “Solar Made Carpet” – which immediately led to the winning of a huge contract with the Universities of California.

The best at Sustainability are constantly looking for the opportunity where the rest of us see problems. These people will win.