The New Idealism

Why sustainable innovation is the only way forward

Every organization goes through life stages, and experiences growing pains. If you think of an organization like a human being, this is easier to picture: The tentative baby steps of the startup, enthusiastic and full of experimental energy but prone to falling down. These are the “anything could happen” years. Then there’s the adolescent stage, when increasing capabilities and success can surprise even the organization itself, but larger worries start to creep in. (The “more money, more problems” years.) Then as an organization enters its adulthood, and middle-age looms, there’s always the question: Will it settle in, and get comfortable, or risk it all — dream bigger, become more consequential, do more good for more people? The organization could fail, knocking them back into stumbling baby steps, or experience an organizational rebirth of cool, where the idealism of their early years is finally matched by the power, finesse, and skills to navigate ever-more complex landscapes and make tremendous things happen.

I’ve surrounded myself with researchers, designers and creative technologists for my entire career. Together my team and I shared an ambition to have a real impact: for individuals, for organizations, for our planet. We prototyped holistic solutions within the medical, household, manufacturing and mobility sectors — always with the human being at the center of our process. When our organization was presented with the opportunity to combine our resources with renowned business and technology minds as part of an acquisition, we knew we had to take it, for our customers and for the sake of an idealism that never left us, throughout all of our organizational life stages.

At the scale and with the multidisciplinary teams we now collaborate with, we can be a part of driving the entire global economy into a space where everything we do is evaluated through the lens of sustainability.

Why sustainability? To me, sustainable innovation means thinking in a new way. Given the urgent and interdependent challenges confronting the world — a world where asymmetry, disruption, age, polarization, and eroded trust are fundamentally changing the way millions of people live and work — organizations must reconfigure themselves to stay viable. In our “10 years to midnight” reality, building a more sustainable and resilient future in which all people can thrive is the only way forward.

While realistic about the challenges ahead, sustainable innovation is also optimistic. Sustainable innovation understands that we don’t necessarily have to choose between profits and the environment, and we may not have to trade speed for safety. If we’re really smart about it, we can have both.

Sustainability is also vital because your customer cares, even if you personally don’t. In the very near future — if not already — your customer will care deeply about your organization’s purpose, social impact, and world consciousness, and if you’re not out ahead of them, it will be impossible to stay relevant. Irony, cynicism, escapism — all have their place. But going forward those who can combine idealism, creativity, stakeholder orientation and technical skills will carry the day.

Growing up, I never wanted to do or make anything that was just about how to get more people to spend more time or more money on a product they didn’t need. In my opinion, that’s not where creative people should spend their energy. Instead, we need our most creative minds working together with the finest business brains to make products & services that are desirable not only from a human, but also from a planetary perspective. This means the focus on improving outcomes for single users will quickly be superseded by a much more holistic sense that draws humans into a more complex dance of social and collective responsibility.

Sustainable innovation reflects a shift from thinking first of technical feasibility — what can we make with this cool new technology? — to investigating how we can foster human flourishing through technology.

The ever-increasing complexity of the world demands more smartness, broader systems thinking, deeper expertise, and extensive co-creation across disciplines.

Among the sustainable innovation initiatives we’re excited about introducing to an ever broader portfolio of clients:

Sustainability Analysis

We examine a product or service with a holistic perspective on its life cycle and value chain. We explore the product’s impact in terms of its manufacture, business model, and how customers actually use it. We then look for opportunities to create sustainable design or circularity model interventions, such as repairability, reusability and recyclability.

Ecosystem Insights

Through ecosystem research we discover connections on the level of a society, market, or organization, exploring both human and non-human actors. Our process complements market and user research and puts these findings within a wider environmental and strategic context.

Ethics Exploration

We explore the ethical quandaries embodied by a product, service, or emerging technology, to help clients anticipate what the implications of investment in any or all might be. Through immersive research, we examine a product’s impact on both direct and indirect stakeholders, to determine which values are either encouraged or threatened by its use and scaling.

Ecosystem Map

An ecosystem map — a key result of ecosystem research — visualizes the salient stakeholders and actors in an ecosystem, which could be on the level of society, a market, an organization, or even a household. The map expands a project’s perspective and can be a powerful stimulus for potential strategic interventions and service design.

Product Ethics Principles

Product Ethics principles highlight the positive consequences a product seeks to have in the world. These principles — often the result of an ethics exploration as well as ecosystem research — include illustrative examples of do’s and don’ts, plus examples of how specific values like transparency, privacy, or security can be activated. They are used in the design process and in both internal and external communications.

Speculative Scenario

Speculative Scenarios look forward to present future possible, probable and desirable worlds for a company or product category. These scenarios draw on trend research and ecosystem research, and involve designed artefacts that can include provocation cards and provocotypes, as well as speculative fictions expressed through video and other forms of storytelling.

Product Sustainability Strategy

Building on top of the opportunities uncovered by the sustainability analysis, we select business model approaches that help organizations systemically implement sustainable choices in their offerings.

Ethical Interfaces

The Ethical Interface activates Product Ethics Principles using exemplary interfaces or service components. An interface can be designed to show how transparency and privacy experiences can be optimized for the user, or how the UX flow can avoid manipulative “dark UX patterns.” They can be created as a prototype or showcase to sensitize future design, or to help implement end-to-end UX designs.

I remember the mad rush to establish a digital strategy ten years ago. Today, of course, no company would imagine their digital strategy was different, separate and apart from their overall strategy. Similarly, sustainable innovation will become the new normal, the very bedrock understanding that every organization needs not only to preserve or regain people’s trust in them, but simply to stay competitive.

If you’re like me, the younger you believed that a much better world was possible. Please believe me when I tell you, that young person who swore you’d never compromise your ideals for the sake of making money? You don’t have to leave that person behind. You can go big. You can solve real problems. Sustainable innovation, in my view, marks the rebirth of idealism. I hope you’ll join us in exploring how it’s done.