This morning, I spoke on a panel called “Driving Innovation Through Sustainability” at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference. Given that the panel was held at the eye-popping hour of 8 AM, it’s testament to the topic that the room was overflowing. Or perhaps the draw was my fellow panelists – Matt Kistler, Senior Vice President of Sustainability for Walmart, Rick Rommel, Senior Vice President for Emerging Business at Best Buy and Scott Elrod, Vice President of the Hardware Systems Laboratory at the Palo Alto Research Center – and our moderator, Roger Ballentine, President of Green Strategies.
Roger started us off by saying that a sustainability agenda can act like a pair of night-vision goggles, helping corporate managers and executives find innovation where they couldn’t see it before. That certainly resonated with me – I’ve seen that pattern over and over again in the companies with which we work. In fact, I’m often asked of our partners, “Why did they need you to find an innovation that’s clearly good for their business?” I think it’s because in many ways Environmental Defense Fund provides those night-vision goggles Roger was talking about, bringing a new green lens to business as usual.
The analogy seems to work, especially when it comes to finding efficiencies within a company’s operations and even for greening a supply chain. Matt had some great examples about how that works with moving innovations “up the value chain” to Walmart suppliers and, increasingly, “down to consumers.” Rick added a great point about how moving innovation does not go in a straight line but rather a loop, especially when you start to bring in innovations in product take-backs.
Things got even more interesting when we got to talking about how to move innovations horizontally across industry sectors. Scott postulated that innovations can move even when the intellectual property is owned by one company if that company has the incentive to build market share. The kinds of barriers we see to quick adoption are generally not about intellectual property but rather basic market failures: How can companies become more aware of the innovations applicable to them? How often do companies pass up beneficial innovations simply because someone else thought of them first?
Perhaps the most interesting conversation came toward the end of the session when we explored what it takes to create a culture of innovation within a company. Can we, Rick asked, import some of the characteristics of the venture capital community – quick failures, competitive capital – into a corporate bureaucracy? Or is it more important to understand the cultural values that already exist in your company and link the sustainability agenda to the drivers you already have in place?
What would it take to bring night-vision goggles to your company?