Anyone pursuing sustainability through innovation faces the defining challenge of finding growth in the face of declining resource stocks. It’s not a new challenge, by any means, but it is at the core of pursuing sustainable innovaitons. And you won’t find it in the typical narratives celebrating innovation or understanding how to manage it.
For want of a nail, A123 stumbles
EV battery maker A123 hit a new rough patch this week—another example of the “Faster, Better, Cheaper—pick any two” trade-off that affects all companies, but few like clean tech companies. And another warning to those who think innovation is the same regardless of what company or which industry you’re in.
Great artists steal, the rest of us tweak
I've often quoted Pablo Picasso, who once said "Good artists borrow, great artists steal." What he meant was that good artists know enough to build on the works of others, but fail to add anything to their replication of the original. Certainly they don't add enough to hide their source material. Great artists, on the other hand, often bring enough of the creative process to their borrowing that evidence of the original source (or often sources) is quickly lost. An interesting and polarizing event is unfolding around a novel blogging application, Svbtle, by Dustin Curtis and an open-source copy, Obtvse, by Nate Wienert, that illustrates this challenge. You be the judge.
The challenge of innovating in brownfield versus greenfield markets
Across the globe, many of the opportunities for sustainable innovation will be in mature markets like energy, transportation, agriculture, construction and will present very different challenges from those of innovating in information technology, Internet applicaitons, or social media. The differences between driving change in these different conditions is a defining characteristic of each—something that entrepreneurs, investors, and policy makers alike seem to forget.
The Breakthrough Bias
We associate innovation with dramatic technological or market breakthroughs that revolutionize industries overnight. So much so that despite continuing evidence to the contrary—that both today’s most succcessful organizations and most revolutionary technologies were not new—organizations, policy makers, and the public show a breakthrough bias when pursuing, funding, or anticipating innovation. This bias becomes even more salient in the pursuit of sustainability, reflected in outrageously ambitious “goals” that, as a result, create significant challenges for those trying to manage the innovation process.
The many faces of the sustainability literature
Does the world need another book on sustainability? Honestly, I'm not really sure. Having waded into this literature roughly five years ago, and have since ventured into some of its stronger currents, I have seen that much of what needs to be said has already been said — it's just that not everyone has said it and not everyone has heard it. It helped me to recognize there are different approaches to the topic, and a roadmap would be useful — here's the one I've come up with to help me make sense of the large and growing conversation.
Risk, Uncertainty, and the Challenge of Sustainable Innovation
Innovation is risky business. For companies pursuing sustainable innovations, these risks take on the scale of the effort and the context of the problems, the politics, and the markets involved. The most important aspect of this challenge to sustainable innovation is understanding the nature of risk at work. Without this understanding, innovation efforts are paralyzed and innovation policies—especially those intending to promote new investments—stifle them instead.
The Challenges of Sustainable Innovation
Pick up any list of “most innovative companies” (there are dozens published each year) and three things become immediately apparent. First, there is no shortage of role models for innovation. In fact, outside the crowd favorites (Apple, Google, and Facebook) there is not much overlap between lists. Second, there is no singular definition of innovation that fits all of these companies—some of behemoth multinationals employing hundreds of thousands while others are startups with less than hundred; some are in heavy industries and others are iPhone apps; some in the US and others in developing countries. Finally, there are very few—no more than 2 or 3 on most lists—that are there because they’ve developed and launched sustainable solutions. Should we really treat the best practices of innovation as if they applied equally to all companies?
Faster, better, cheaper: Pick any two.
Is it time to revisit (or visit for the first time) some of the central challenges of developing and launching sustainable innovations? With the demise of Solyndra and Beacon Power still recent memories; with Ener1 entering bankruptcy; and the recent disclosures that EV makers Fisker Automotive and Tesla are troubled, it may be long overdue.
HR 3606, jobs, capital, and policy’s folly
Two stories crossed my desk this morning. My gut reacted the the first one even before I could make sense of it, the second explained why. They had to do with entrepreneurs, venture capital (lower case), and jobs policies.
Andrew Hargadon 