Opening up innovation for sustainability

In March this year, M&S launched its ‘Your Green Idea’ competition inviting customers to suggest new, positive, green actions the company could implement as part of its ever-expanding Plan A. The winner, voted for by the public, would receive £100,000 to donate to an organisation, charity or company of their choice.

These types of ‘open source’ projects can be a powerful way of tackling the challenges of sustainability, and hats off to M&S for being progressive and creative. But something went wrong and it announced earlier this summer:

“After much deliberation, our judges collectively agreed that we didn’t actually have three brand new brilliant ideas that would meet our criteria of fitting with what we do at M&S, having a sufficiently significant environmental benefit, and allowing our 21 million customers to take part.”

What happened and what can we learn about how you innovate for sustainability and structure these kind of projects?

Your Green Idea is only one example of a recent wave of ‘open innovation’ projects directed at companies’ big environmental and social challenges. Starbucks’ recent Betacup competition invited ideas and designs to reduce the number of non-recyclable cups thrown away by its consumers. Do take a peek at the winning Karma Cup, a behavioural initiative in which every customer bringing in a reusable cup marks a chalkboard by the till, with the 10th person getting a free coffee.

Similarly, Levi’s ‘Care to Air’ challenge invited novel ideas to encourage people to air dry their jeans. This tackled a growing US trend for people to use tumble driers, the energy from which accounts for 60% of the carbon footprint of a pair of jeans over its lifespan.

This year also saw the launch of dedicated open innovation platforms where the challenges or briefs are directed solely at solving social and environmental problems – notably myoocreate and OpenIDEO.

As a formal concept, ‘open innovation’ was coined by Henry Chesborough, Professor at UC Berkeley, as recently as 2003. Fuelled significantly by the internet, in essence it “assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology”.

Companies have been quick to embrace this as a way to open a new dialogue directly with customers and as a way to get lots of brains from outside their business to throw in great, new, and commercially viable ideas. Through its Connect + Develop program, open innovation veterans P&G claim “50 percent of product initiatives involve significant collaboration with outside innovators”.

It’s understandable that open innovation would be quickly turned to sustainability goals. It allows companies to invite collaboration on many of those thorny social and environmental issues outside their direct, operational control. And if ’outsiders’ are involved in creating the solutions they may be more acceptable to that outside world too. Levi’s is a clear case in point with the invite around laundering jeans.

One reason why Your Green Idea may have stumbled where others succeeded is because it asked for ideas from its customers, whereas other initiatives targeted creatives, designers or innovators. Consumers often struggle to express their needs and desires in the abstract world of a sustainable future. But – as we’re finding in our work on sustainability in the UK creative industries – involving creatives in tackling sustainability challenges can lead to amazing ideas and imaginitive leaps: that’s what they do!

It’s surprising therefore that M&S should turn to its customers with the competition given that Stuart Rose, the former CEO and instigator of Plan A, often said that as a leader, M&S needed to be “half a step ahead of consumers”. Why ask them for ideas and innovations if that’s the case?

There’s also a world of difference between asking people to suggest an idea and asking people to solve a specific problem or challenge. Though problem solving alone can be limiting, the invitation to contribute a new idea on such a broad topic as sustainability or going green can be daunting. Little surprise then that M&S’s submissions were disappointing.

What lessons does this give us for open innovation for sustainability? It can be a powerful and engaging tool to help companies on their sustainability journey, but it needs to be used and designed properly. We’d suggest two important criteria are; getting the brief and challenge right, and targeting the right people to ‘open up’ to.