Not Another ‘Innovation’ Session

Speakers

• Ted Howes, Director, Advisory Services, BSR
• Eric Olson, Senior Vice President, Advisory Services, BSR (Moderator)

Highlights

• Innovation is not just product-focused—it is also relevant for corporate strategy and engaging employees and customers.
• Sustainability professionals can add value to company innovation efforts by cutting across corporate silos, redesigning employee and customer engagement, and bringing a sustainability lens to business strategy.
• Innovation is messy and time-consuming, so there is value in rapid prototyping that allows for fast failures and learning.

Memorable Quotes

“If you ask people the question you want to have answered, you may not get the answers you need.” —Ted Howes, BSR

“Sustainability groups can convene an improbable conversation around a product by creating trust and developing external relationships.” —Eric Olson, BSR

“Whenever you are designing programs to engage employees or customers, they will tell you when you have the right answer.” —Ted Howes, BSR

Overview

Olson opened the session by noting the importance of demystifying and unpacking the topic of innovation and enabling greater engagement in it. He highlighted the core questions of the session: What do sustainability professionals have to do with innovation, and how can they contribute to it? He noted that because this field is still emerging, few professionals know how to connect sustainability and innovation, and maybe no one knows how to approach it systematically.

Howes supported Olson, saying that the topic of innovation is not easy to address. The word innovation itself is, similar to sustainability, difficult to pin down: If you ask a roomful of people what it means, you will get as many answers as there are people in the room. To reframe this idea, he suggested talking about “ways to be innovative” rather than focusing on “innovation.” He suggested we think about what we do on a day-to-day basis, with a focus on human-centered design. If we observe and understand people’s relationship with their surroundings, we can understand what is desirable for people, as well as what is viable and feasible to implement from a business standpoint.

Howes also suggested a focus on how organizations are structured. Reflecting on the morning’s keynote, he quoted Best Buy’s Brian Dunn, saying, “Insights drive opportunity.” It is important to consider what drives individuals’ interactions with each other within their organizations. Howes also emphasized the importance of acting on opportunities through rapid, rough prototyping that allows faster failures and generates insights into how people struggle with the problems they are exploring.

Howes then discussed how sustainability professionals can support these efforts, by bringing a sustainability lens to the business, redesigning employee engagement, and connecting organizational silos. He noted that people with sustainability positions within organizations can often see across the group’s silos. Olson highlighted the example of Nike, which has for years looked at specific areas where sustainability can add to their products’ design process, but he noted that innovation extends to other areas. He explained that BSR emphasizes the ability of sustainability teams to help companies think more broadly about their operating environments and better understand the future.

A representative of Maersk Line in the audience described its efforts with BSR to run futures workshops in different locations around the world that involved people from different company functions. These workshops looked at sustainability issues and their influence on the company’s business environment. They highlighted a range of things the company should consider, such as climate change, which do not come up when looking at the business from a narrower point of view.

Olson suggested that sustainability professionals also have the ability to play in spaces adjacent to their core work areas. He highlighted the example of Best Buy, which has developed a venture capital model that serves as an ally to the sustainability team in addressing the company’s material issues.

A representative of PwC noted that both sustainability and innovation groups sit within the company’s corporate strategy function. PwC struggles with innovation in a regulated industry; it especially wants people to have enthusiasm for exploring new areas that may drive revenues, but it needs to control this exploration because regulation does not allow for much innovation. Howes replied that constraints are useful for innovation. “What do you want to do in the future?” is a lousy question, but having some guidelines to focus that type of question can lead to successful innovation.

Another participant emphasized how useful sustainability teams are at connecting different parts of an organization. In this participant’s example, the company was able to bring together 12 people from different functions all relevant to a given product, and this was the first time that 10 of them had met.

Another participant commented on building a conversation by creating space within the company where it is safe to have a discussion that connects various people (away from central command and control) and by encouraging a commitment to share much more across the organization. It is less important to focus on specific innovations than to establish an approach to support innovation.

Olson and Howes closed the session by noting that there are opportunities to continue this conversation and that a longer session at a future BSR Conference would be useful.