Innovationedge is pleased to announce the release of a new white paper on sustainability and green strategy. The paper, “Green Innovation: Do You Have a G-Rated Business™?” is available in PDF form. It includes a brief excerpt from Conquering Innovation Fatigue, our recent book published by John Wiley & Sons. Here are the opening paragraphs:
Green Innovation: Do You Have a G-Rated Business™?
The many pressures for businesses and products to become green offer numerous opportunities for true innovation, not just in products and services but in entire business models and in the web of relationships (the “value network”) around a business. But in spite of the rich opportunities for innovation, many companies boast of being green after doing little more than adding a little recycled material to a product or package, or adding some “earth friendly” furniture to their offices.
How can a business pursue the changes and innovations needed to become really green? And what does it mean to be green?
Let’s discuss what green is, and then we’ll address approaches to green innovation.
G-Rated Business™
We recommend that companies think about green issues and sustainability in terms of becoming a “G-Rated Business™.” This concept from Innovationedge draws upon an analogy to movie ratings. For a movie to be G-rated, it needs to be free of gratuitous sex, violence, and profanity. A two-hour movie with 119-minutes of mild content can lose its G-rating for just a few seconds of material. It’s not enough to avoid graphic violence of nudity for 99% of the movie – it generally needs to be clean throughout. While we recognize that there are abundant imperfections in movie ratings, we expect a movie to be substantially free of certain content for the entire movie, not just most of it, to be G-Rated. Now if we let “G” stand for “green”, what is a “G-Rated Business™”? It’s one that seeks to be green throughout its operations, consistently, not just in selected scenes. It is one with sustainability integrated into its operations and business model at many levels.