Incorporating sustainability into your innovation management cycle

We live in a world of constant change, where firms need to focus on their operational bottom line more than ever. Yet, at the same time, our customers are not just judging us on our products, price and service, but also on our social and environmental impact. It is now all about our triple bottom line: financial, environmental and social performance.

Lets review innovation and sustainability definitions from previous posts.

• Innovation is about the implementation of a new idea for the purpose of creating value: value for the firm and value for the consumer.
• Sustainability is achieving outcomes that can be maintained indefinitely without depleting the support system or endangering present and future needs.

With that, it only makes sense to incorporate sustainability and sustainable business and management practices to our innovation process, and more importantly ensure it is the foundational principle of our innovation management activities. To refresh, innovation management is focused on managing and directing the firm’s resources and energy utilized for innovation to generate successful economic and competitive rewards.

As always, we have to tailor the concept of sustainability to our situation at hand. So, instead of taking a cookie cutter approach, this article highlights key areas to take into account as you are incorporating sustainability strategy into your innovation management activities. As each industry, technology, culture, target customer, and location have their own unique social and environmental challenge, customizing and developing your sustainability strategy will require planning and time.

In case you are questioning the need to incorporate sustainability strategy into your innovation management activities, let me repeat… Developing sustainable innovation management strategy is all about moving from traditional, resource intensive processes to methods that uses fewer resources while maximizing value. While it may not be obvious, studies have shown that sustainable development ultimately reduces development costs in the long haul, such as in the case of more optimized and environmentally friendly packaging.

Your innovation management activities are mainly founded on four key areas: culture, people/talent, technology/product and process. You can start identifying potential opportunities and sustainability issues in each of these areas by starting conversations and asking questions within your organization. As you are building your bigger picture, also use this opportunity to conduct your sustainability assessment, as it is important to understand where you currently stand in each of these areas.

• Culture — Sustainability is not just about managing the status quo more efficiently; it is also about building a culture that is mindful, compassionate about its impacts to society and the environment, and empowered to take action to improve. Global awareness of diverse cultural and ecological impacts, overall ownership and accountability, organizational learning, how well it can act is all part of building a culture that embraces sustainable choices.
• People/Talent — Globalization, resource shortages and demographic changes require your corporate sustainability agenda to incorporate your people policies. How you attract and retain talent, how your people internalize and act on your sustainability goals, how you enable your workforce to reduce its travel carbon footprint via telecommuting or video-conferencing programs, and how you sustain and nurture their creativity should all be incorporated into your sustainability strategy.
• Process — For a very generic term, process incorporates many different activities that take your innovation from idea to dissemination and beyond. For each of those activities, determine where you can make your process more sustainable and repeatable, without requiring significant resources. Ensure design and process innovation is part of your core competency, so that you are continuously looking for ways to build more sustainable products and technologies.
• Technology/Product — Evaluate every aspect of your technology and product life cycle to determine how you can incorporate sustainability strategies. In your analysis, make sure to include your value chain and your ecosystem evaluation.

In order to prioritize, start with a good understanding of what aspects of your products and services have an environmental or social component. Here are some starting discussion points:

• How/where can I reduce my environmental footprint?
• Product life cycle: Incorporate what-if scenarios to make aspects of your product more green. Redefine end-of-life concepts so there is less landfill impact. Utilize materials and processes that are more eco-friendly. And make sure to incorporate your evaluation of marketing communications.
• Customer support and service: Enable your customers to be greener: recycling programs, reduced packaging, sustainable upgrade programs. Make it easy for your customers to be green.
• Operations management: Analyze your manufacturing and transportation processes to reduce impact to natural resources. Innovate new process where applicable, such as ‘why doesn’t Amazon group my separate orders placed on the same day, and ship them all together?’
• Incorporate 4Rs across your organization, technology and products: refuse, reduce and reuse first, then as a last resort, recycle.
• Your ecosystem: Evaluate your value chain and see how your partners are handling sustainable processes, such as with recycled plastic or biodegradable materials, replacing ingredients or components with more environmentally friendly options.
• Procurement and suppliers: Evaluate your purchasing process for sustainability: recycling-friendly materials, processes and packaging. Ask for participation from employees and suppliers to incorporate sustainable practices.
• Product design: Design your products with sustainable goals in mind: reduce resource requirements, better manage all aspects of product application, dissemination and end-of-life from the time it gets to the hands of the customer to the time it ends up in the landfill. Do ‘what-if’ analysis to understand the environmental impact if demand increases. And, always simplifying your product to make it easy to be green.

As you build your sustainability strategy, you will identify new opportunities, risks and bottom line implications. Ultimately your success depends on your leadership, commitment, planning, creativity and innovations. Recognize this is a journey and track your progress using your benchmark: how well your company is performing against your sustainability requirements, and how your customers are reacting to it. Also create a sustainability knowledge center to track best practices, policies and learnings. Make your goals and progress public, and share it with your organization. This will ensure everyone is living up to the same standards. Employee engagement is crucial for any sustainability strategy.

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