Courtesy : www.greenbiz.com

Green innovation design

Recent months and years, Makower said, offered quite a few “who’da thunk” moments in the business world’s move toward environmental sustainability: $4 gallons of gasoline as a driver toward fuel efficiency; Wal-Mart emerging as a keystone of green practices; product toxicity as an emerging, financial concern among manufacturers; and a “race to the top” for greater efficiency in as diverse of sectors as computer hardware and automobiles.

With those developments all pushing the way toward greater corporate action on environmental issues, Makower laid out some of the issues on deck at the conference, including:

• How can companies’ sustainability efforts improve the top line, not just the bottom line?
• What will it take to maintain progress on green goals when increasing constraints are all around?
• A lack of standards almost across the board with sustainability means it’s unclear just how green is green enough;
• And how do all the people at the conference, working in different positions at different companies, tie it all together in a holistic way?

The presentations during the first half of Thursday’s conference outlined both ways that one company has made a green product happen, and ways that companies can boost the innovation quotient of their own thought processes.

First up was Clorox, discussing the anatomy of the company’s new green brand of cleaners, Green Works. Matt Kohler, Green Works’ brand manager, and Sumi Cate, the technical lead on the product line, outlined what trends came together to make Green Works possible:

“It was a perfect marriage of consumer need and technical capability,” explained Cate, adding that shoppers are now more open to green cleaning products than they were even a year ago, and Clorox has been able to develop products with 99 percent natural ingredients that work as well or better than conventional products. Kohler explained that, although he couldn’t give sales figures for the products, they have vastly exceeded expectations, even after those expectations were raised at least five times.

The effectiveness of the products is just one of four elements that made Green Works’ launch successful, Kohler said. Other elements are availability (can I get it at a store near me), price (can I afford it once I find it), and the brand (do I trust this company). Brand trust turned out to be a key element in the marketing of the product — Kohler said he originally was strongly against putting the Clorox logo on Green Works, since it’s a logo strongly associated with bleach and other strong, chemical cleaners.

Surprisingly, customer surveys said the Clorox brand was highly reassuring. “‘Hallelujah!'” was how Kohler put it, “finally a major manufacturer willing to put their name on a green product.” That in addition to having another prominent logo on the site — that of the Sierra Club — helps to reassure green-minded customers that it’s both green and effective.

“This is not a coastal phenomenon,” Kohler said, referring to green hubs in San Francisco, Boston, Austin and other metros, “this is about bringing green cleaning to mainstream America.”

Flashes of Green

In the first of several Flashes at the gathering — short, focused messages on a specific aspect of design or innovation — Peter White, the director of global sustainability at Procter & Gamble, laid out exactly what guidelines the company uses in introducing green products. There are five planks, he said, which take their definition of sustainable beyond simply the environment. The first plank is improving environmental performance; the second is reducing the overall footprint of operations; third is improving lives through social responsibility programs; the fourth involves engaging employees on initiatives; and the final plank is shaping future sustainability strategies.

Among the big challenges faced by P&G is developing ways to change consumer behavor — an example he offered was cold-water laundry detergent. In measuring the energy impact of all of P&G’s 300 brands, the company found by an overwhelming margin the most energy used in all products’ entire life cycle was customers washing clothes at home.

A staggering 350 million gigajoules of energy worldwide is used to wash laundry, and by encouraging customers to wash in cold water instead of warm, an equally staggering amount of energy could be conserved. Just one example of the products developed to encourage this shift is Procter & Gamble’s Tide Coldwater detergent.

Making Innovation Work

The next two panels on Thursday morning focused on the process of innovation. First, Jennifer Van der Meer, a green design strategist, sat with Robert Shelton, an innovation thought leader and director of PRTM, discussed the various strategies that companies use to bring green innovation to market. An ongoing discussion on the panel involved a dichotomy between radical, sudden innovation vs. sustained, incremental innovation.

Van der Meer made the argument that at this point in time, with dramatic climate change already occurring, radical leaps in innovation are urgently needed, rather than slow, steady progress. Shelton countered that humans as a species are not adept at innovation, and that even those companies that have succeeded through innovating — Apple, IBM, and Procter & Gamble as examples he offered — have also all faced a “near-death experience” when they couldn’t keep the pace of innovation steady.

Toyota served as a case study to bridge the gap between these two poles. The company’s embrace of hybrid-electric technology five years ago, in an era of much cheaper oil and much less individual interest in conservation, as well as its unconventional body design and educational driver interface combined to form a radical innovation, Van der Meer said, while Shelton agreed, but called the end result a series of aggregate, incremental innovations.

Further illustrating the challenges facing companies looking to innovate was the final session of the morning: Amnon Levav’s “Innovation and Sustainability: a Love-Hate Relationship.” Levav, the managing director of SIT International, a global innovation strategy consultancy, explained how sustainability can serve as both a help and a hindrance to innovation.

Through visual examples and interactive exercises, Levav showed attendees how adding more features — a standard feature of “innovation” in most products — is not necessarily sustainable, but how paring down to the bare basics of pure, green form is hardly innovative. Although successful green innovation involves walking a fine line between innovation and sustainability, Levav explained in simple terms one of the biggest obstacles to innovation.

He calls the idea “task unification”, and explained it as assigning a new task to an existing resource, and by examples Levav showed the crowd several examples of using city buses for effective advertising. This usually involves overcoming an ingrained human instinct to see one object, one purpose.

But by expanding the realm of what’s possible, companies and organizations can breathe new life into existing products, exceptional examples being the original Volkswagen Beetle’s use of engine heat to warm the cabin of the car and the SETI@home program turning computer down-time into scientific exploration.