Sustainable innovations are increasingly at the forefront of successful companies

It makes sense that sustainability and innovation in business naturally grow together. The best innovations make the earth better than it was before. QuestionPro community platform supports companies in creating sustainable innovations

Innovations and sustainability

As companies become more concerned and committed to sustainability issues, the world of innovation has expanded to include sustainability more in recent years. The two concepts are so intertwined that today's sustainability leaders are 400 percent more likely to be viewed as innovation leaders than those who are not sustainability leaders

What does “sustainable innovation” mean? Essentially, these are innovations stimulated and driven by concern for resources and the environment. Companies embrace the idea that resources should not be consumed faster than they are replenished and that waste generation should not exceed the carrying capacity of the ecosystem. This belief drives new innovations across industries. Companies that develop sustainable innovations usually have a very strong innovation culture.

Sustainable innovation goes beyond ordinary innovation in three ways

Compared to most types of innovation, sustainable innovation is more disruptive, driven by an ethical rationale, and fundamentally more collaborative. Often several companies or organizations are involved in sustainable innovations. Or ideas for developing sustainable innovations are gained and promoted via open innovation platforms or crowdsourcing clouds.

Sustainable innovation is more disruptive because it creates entirely new and better business models that make it harder for traditional companies to defend the status quo. It has a stronger rationale because consumers are demanding more sustainability from the companies that produce the products and services they want. This sustainability is now considered so important by many customers that companies can no longer help but develop sustainable products to create positive customer experiences.

Rising raw material prices and the development of clean technologies are further factors that strengthen the case for sustainable innovation. After all, no one will be able to do business on a dead planet unless we redress the balance in favor of sustainability. Finally, sustainable innovation is more collaborative because it is a cross-disciplinary concept. Companies must work across industries to unlock the value of sustainable innovation. This turns the company’s “value chain” into a “value network”.

Sustainable innovations are the best business model

Sustainable innovation is good for the economy in many ways. On the one hand, it corresponds to consumers' desire for more sustainability. With sustainable innovation, companies achieve their economic performance due to (and not despite) environmentally and socially conscious design and working methods. The result is a cleaner, healthier, fairer and more stable world – a higher tide that lifts economic performance across the board.

Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the need for sustainability and therefore the development of sustainable innovations. The fact is that population growth and increased waste levels are increasing environmental concerns. As these concerns increase, the market power of the sustainable business also increases, with non-sustainable businesses ultimately being left behind.

Some examples of sustainable innovation

Sustainable innovation is happening all around us, and that's cause for celebration. Here are just a few of the many exemplary sustainable innovations taking place in the world today:

• The Green Building Initiative (GBI) sets out standard best practices for building new structures and upgrading existing ones. The ultimate goal is to make buildings more resource efficient, healthier and environmentally sustainable.
• This is also sustainable innovation: herb gardens in supermarkets significantly reduce the need for plastic packaging for fresh herbs. The Dutch supermarket chain Albert Heijn started using these herbs in 2017. Customers can cut their own herbs in the store and only buy as many as they need.
• Many types of sustainable plastics are being introduced. Some are not made from petroleum like traditional plastics, and some are produced in a carbon neutral manner. A company makes plastics from carbon emissions that would otherwise be released into the air.
• The PowWow Energy app is a simple mobile app that notifies farmers when sensors in their irrigation systems indicate problems. It allows farmers to monitor their own water consumption data and immediately detect pipe leaks or breaks. This way they can avoid waste while maximizing crop yields.
• Joro is like Fitbit for your carbon consumption. It's an application that takes your purchasing data and analyses it for its relative carbon impact, allowing you to see how much of a footprint you leave behind each day. It also offers great features like the ability to instantly balance your flight once you purchase a flight.
• UBQ can just about cut down on plastic recycling because it automatically turns unsorted waste piles into reusable plastic granules that can be used to make a range of new products. This is how sustainable innovation became a real innovation cycle.
• Gates also focuses on sustainable innovation. For example, he funded Heliogen, which recently reached a new milestone. It uses artificial intelligence to align an array of mirrors to reflect sunlight in a way that generates heat in excess of 1.000 degrees Celsius (about a quarter of what is found on the surface of the sun). This means we can generate heat that is used for manufacturing in a sustainable way.
• We're still in the early days of electric flight, but Harbor Air's electric aircraft has already completed its first fully electric flight.
• An important aspect of protecting against the worst effects of climate change is reforestation and protecting the green spaces we have left. It turns out that drones can plant trees 150 times faster than other methods, and Dendra Systems has a goal of planting 500 billion trees!
• ROCAPET. Recycling plastic bottles and combining them with recycled sand to create a new form of road material.

Sustainability and innovation are natural partners because innovation is about making things better in the long term. With the community platform for innovation management, you can implement sustainable innovations quickly and easily.

The development of sustainable innovations requires professional innovation management

Innovation management is basically the key to any successful innovation, sustainable or not. Companies and organizations that do not have professional innovation management will hardly be able to develop groundbreaking or sustainable innovations. The collection of ideas (ideation), the evaluation and the advancement of ideas alone is hardly possible without the appropriate technology! With its community platform, QuestionPro offers such an innovative and web-based technology for innovation management, which, in addition to ideation tools, also offers functions that enable you to carry out simple innovation market research as a self-service. QuestionPro's community platform for innovation management can also be operated as an open innovation community, thus opening up opportunities for you to collaborate with other companies and organizations to develop sustainable innovations.

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Develop sustainable innovations with QuestionPro's community platform for innovation management

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