What does innovation have to do with environmentally-friendly design? Everything!

The incorporation of environmental concerns in the design and manufacture of products is becoming one of the industry’s greatest strategic challenges, not only from a design and engineering perspective but also from a management and marketing point of view.  Certainly those top sustainability-driven companies listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index consistently outperform because of their focus on sustainability initiatives.  

Today guest-Blogger Robert Spreeman, Vice Chair of the Institute of Packaging Professionals (IoPP) Sustainable Packaging Task Group shares thoughts on Designing for the Environment, a.k.a. DfE.  Robert is the Manager of Sustainability at Sturm Foods, and participates in sustainability panels including one featured in this month’s Packaging Machinery Technology Magazine on the PMMI MarketTrends Roundtable Conference held recently in Tampa.  

Read on: 

Innovation and Designing for the Environment (DfE)

By Robert Spreeman Jr., Contributing Blogger

Recently our IoPP Sustainable Packaging Task Group toured furniture manufacturer Herman Miller in Holland, Michigan, where I saw first hand how designers engineer office products so that they can be disassembled in 15 minutes. Each component was labeled for the proper recycling stream.

HM truly follows the cradle-to-cradle system by enabling their products to cycle back to infancy as something new. HM’s focus is on incorporating increasingly more environmentally-sustainable materials, features, and manufacturing processes into new product designs. The company’s Design for the Environment (DfE) team sets the bar high for its environmentally-sensitive design standards for new and existing HM products by initiating a protocol to guide this effort. 

DfE difference 

For those not familiar with Designing for the Environment, there are three major DfE elements: environmental manufacturing, environmental packaging, and design for disposal and recycleability.   Environmental manufacturing involves non-toxic processes and production materials, minimum energy utilization and emissions, as well as waste and by-products.   Packaging DfE initiatives utilize environmentally-safe materials that protect the product and perform their intended function, while optimizing the entire supply chain by evaluating material sourcing, process improvement and palletization/transportation optimization.  

Design for disposal and recycleability brings to the table a number of initiatives including using materials that can be easily separated so that they can be channeled into the correct waste stream—either biological or industrial—and focusing on all probable end-of-life scenarios. 

Differentiated design 

To support design for recycleability, design for disassembly needs to enhance maintainability or serviceability of a product, and it enables recycling of materials, component parts, assemblies, and modules.   Forward-thinking companies like HM design products to enable modules to be quickly disassembled—with common hand tools no less—for recycleability.

What can we learn from companies leading the DfE pack?  I personally believe we all can be encouraged to innovate further. The perfection of an existing product isn’t necessarily the best product. There may be other sustainable technologies and materials that will outpace your current system and lead to faster, better and more profitable growth. It’s innovation that is good for everyone.   

A special thanks to friend and Innovation Edge colleague Soren Kaplan for sharing his thoughts today on new directions in innovation. Be sure to check out his links. –Cheryl

Innovating Innovation

By Soren Kaplan, guest blogger

Despite the 122,000,000 hits you’ll get from a Google search on “innovation,” the field is relatively fresh. No one has “the answer” and no company has really gotten it “right.” If they did, we’d all just emulate the model and that would be that.

As the world changes, so does the field of innovation. It used to be that products and processes consumed the vast majority of the innovation air-time within most companies. Today, we’re seeing four directions that are starting to yield strategic fruit for the early innovation adopters:

Open Innovation – UC Berkeley professor Henry Chesbrough coined this term, and has recently extended the concept to include open business models . In today’s networked global economy, firms that embrace the principles of open innovation will clearly have a leg up on those that believe all the smart people work inside their corporate campus. Whereas the old model of R&D-focused innovation assumed that new ideas, technologies, products and services needed to be developed in-house, open innovation turns this assumption on its head.

Design Innovation – You know that industrial design has found its place when Fortune 500 companies like Samsung, Ford, HP, P&G and others instill Chief Creative Officers and Chief Design Officers to lead their innovation efforts. Business schools like Stanford have created design programs. And this year’s Davos gathering featured a special workshop series on the topic. Whereas “design” used to be equivalent with “industrial design”, its scope has expanded to include “experience design” which can include anything from designing user interfaces to defining service and support offerings to orchestrating value-added experiences that surprise and delight customers.

“You” Innovation – When Time Magazine named “you” as the Person of the Year, we all achieved our 15 minutes of fame together. And that’s what it’s all about – collective innovation. From Flickr to YouTube, we’ve seen the role of social networking and user-generated content in value creation. Companies that find ways to harness word-of-mouth marketing, social networks, and “you” will create new forms of value in our networked economy. (OK, maybe THEY’RE not creating it, but at least they’re benefiting from it!)

Socially Responsible Innovation – With global warming, the looming healthcare crisis, rampant childhood obesity, and other social ills, we’ve finally seen the light—or at least the glimmer of a candle. Business should be able to make money while at the same time providing a broader benefit to people, the community and the environment. Wal-Mart is pushing it. Business schools are teaching it.

Business ventures and social responsibility are not paradoxical and don’t have to be at odds. In fact, finding ways to creatively integrate the two can create compelling strategic differentiation in the market. Just ask Ben & Jerry’s, Patagonia, the Body Shop, and especially Interface. Given that scientists just discovered a substantial breakaway crack in the perennial sea ice of the North Pole, we’re sure to see more socially-responsible innovation in the future.

Just like the world, innovation is complex. While new products, services and technologies are always important, the field of innovation is about much more. Sustained value creation relies on innovating how we innovate. That’s what real innovation is all about.