September 9, 2024
Innovation is how we adapt to changing pressures and how we create new opportunities from emerging technologies. But all new ideas carry the potential for positive and negative change, often both at the same time.
And with increasing public awareness and industry regulation around social inclusion and environmental claims, businesses have a responsibility for the decisions they make and the ideas, products and services they introduce to the world.
This article was originally a guest post for my good friends over at White Camino - an awesome strategic marketing agency who use the power of storytelling to elevate and grow brands. Check them out (link at the end).
Design thinking gets us from problem to solution in a human-centric way. It is an innovation process, led by observation and empathy, and refined by user testing and insights, designed to create products and services that will add value to people’s lives.
In the context of design thinking, we often talk about ‘doing the right things’ (understanding the human drivers behind a problem) and ‘doing things right’ (delivering solutions that people will want to use).
It’s a great mantra, but sustainable innovation challenges us to go a step further. It’s not just about doing right by the user (and by extension the business), but by society and the planet as well.
It means we must consider two further aspects across the process:
Up front, it’s important to be clear on the values that are important to your brand, and how the sustainability goals your business (or the project) are working towards, align.
Why? Assessing options, ideas and decisions becomes much easier when we can evaluate against clear goals and criteria. Without these, we quickly fall prey to subjectivity and bias.
Many businesses choose to align their innovation goals, and assessment criteria, to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. These are a set of high level action areas that can be useful to orient thinking when conducting impact analysis.
However, your organisation may have other goals that are more relevant, or more granular. At Subvert Studio for example, we have made a commitment to not support the fossil fuel industry, and so decision making around any ideas we generate, tools and processes we apply, or projects we might choose to take on, includes an assessment of whether or not it moves us towards a world with less fossil fuels and less products based on them.
With that in mind, let's take a look at how this plays out across the innovation process:
As purposeful businesses, we have a responsibility to ensure the way in which we generate ideas is as positive as the solutions themselves. To do so, we can apply sustainable and inclusive design practices to the ideation process.
Of course it will be important to tailor the process to the needs and goals of your organisation, but here’s a few considerations as a starter for ten:
Ideate with purpose: Ensure impacts to people and planet are a consideration in the ideation process. For example when assessing solutions for business viability (one of the four product risks), apply tests for environmental or social impact, and alignment to mission and purpose.
Assess non-functional needs: When capturing and assessing stakeholder and user needs, interrogate inclusive, circular and accessibility considerations as well as more classic functional concerns. Ensure these considerations are also factored into test planning.
Use low carbon tools: Consider the impact of the tools and equipment used for ideation and planning, aiming to reduce, reuse and recycle where possible. Keep in mind low carbon doesn’t always mean paperless: a 1 hour video call has about the same footprint per person as 160 new sticky notes or 1km in an average petrol car.
At Subvert we’ve developed a sustainable impact canvas that encourages teams to think about the effects of making and using a potential solution, and provides an easy visual means to refine down ideas and identify candidates to progress or reject.
Ideas should be assessed against the sustainable goals identified at the outset of the project and across their lifecycle, with potential impacts plotted against the chart.
More negative impacts suggest an idea that may not deliver all the good outcomes we want. They'll need to be avoided, minimised or mitigated.
More positive impacts suggest the idea warrants further development. They should be enabled and amplified as much as possible.
When conducting an assessment, we should also consider impacts that are progressively further removed from the point of origin. What is the impact of the production process, use of the product, or wider social effects?
For example:
So you’ve identified a potentially strong candidate. How do we turn it into an effective solution? How do we build things right?
We can start by ensuring that our solutions are designed with sustainability, inclusivity and the user in mind by applying good design practices.
There are lots of considerations, and as always, they’ll depend on the nature of the endeavour, but here’s some more starting points:
Circular by design: To enable consumers and brands to engage effectively with the circular economy, digital solutions will need to focus on business models that can monetise product longevity or ownership alternatives, and customer experiences that reward reuse and reduction.
Inclusive practices: Inclusive experiences start with inclusive design practices. This means ensuring diverse perspectives are included as part of balanced teams, and that we remove bias from customer journeys by encouraging careful assessment of language, visuals, and hierarchies.
Create frictionless journeys: The easier it is for a user to find what they need, the less resource demands there will be from wrong turns and extra page loads. Lightweight experiences, with intuitive navigation based on familiar design principles, will help users find their way efficiently and reduce unnecessary steps. Where it's relevant, circularity should also be designed seamlessly into customer journeys from the outset, to help it become normalised and avoid feeling like an onerous after-thought.
Communicate with purpose: Stay focused on the content that will help users make effective decisions by aligning messaging to your mission and purpose. Reinforce important information consistently throughout the journey, tailored where relevant to specific audience needs.
Structure and present content in an accessible, and easy to understand format.
Traceability: With more and more focus on accountability, compliance and reporting, mechanisms to track and monitor the by-products and artifacts of production and operation will need to be designed in from the outset. Technical design choices made at this stage will affect the impact of ongoing operation - how will they be managed, reduced or mitigated?
We can’t just put things out into the world and leave them - I mean we could, but very quickly they’d get overtaken by the next new thing.
And so, good product management encourages us to continually learn and adapt based on how users are actually interacting with the experiences we build. It helps us keep up with changing needs and behaviours, and also stay relevant and meaningful as a brand.
By extension good sustainable innovation is continually learning from the impacts of the things we launch. Are they creating the positive changes we hoped, at the scale we want to see? Does the data align with our models and predictions?
While user insights and feedback are still crucial to continuous optimisation, we also need to look beyond just the user to truly measure positive impact.
This means establishing measurement frameworks across environmental and social impact too. How will you account for things like scope 1-3 emissions from the ongoing operation of the solution? How will you monitor and adapt to any broader network effects on society as a whole?
Sustainable innovation is as much about the process as it is the end product. The choices we make and tools we use during ideation and production all have a direct immediate impact on the world, as well as an influence on the impact the end product will deliver.
In digital it can be easy to think those impacts are minimal or not worth mitigating. Of course the impact of running a design workshop or building a website isn’t quite the same as manufacturing and shipping a car.
But the internet is all about scale, and small changes multiplied out through billions of daily interactions can have a huge impact.
As we’ve seen with innovations like Facebook, Spotify or Uber, what start out as small ideas have the potential to drastically change the world. Whether that’s for better or worse is up to us.
With thanks to our friends at White Camino.
