Sustainability as a key driver in innovation

A sustainable system is one that fulfills present and future needs while using and not harming, renewable resources and unique human-environmental resources ...

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“Consumers want a better world not just a better widgets. Moms and Millennials want to do business with responsible companies.”

In his best seller, We First, Simon Mainwaring outlines how brands and consumers can use social media to build a better world. Mainwaring writes of how technology connects consumers and suggests the following values:

· Sustainability

· Fairness of reward

· Fiscal responsibility

· Accountability

· Purposefulness

· Dialogue

· Citizenship

Triple Bottom Line. The TBL is an accounting framework that incorporates three dimensions of performance: social, environmental and financial. Interest in triple bottom line accounting has been growing across for-profit, nonprofit and government sectors.

A sustainable system is one that fulfills present and future needs while using and not harming, renewable resources and unique human-environmental resources of a site: air, land, water, energy, mineral resources and human ecology and or those of other off site system. (A simple path to sustainability-Gifford & Russell)

Some organizations view sustainability as a key driver in innovation.

Sustainability is not a burden on the bottom line. Done correctly being environmentally friendly will lower costs and lower costs increase revenues. Sustainability should be the fuel for innovation. Some thought starters from a few professors in Cambridge, Mass. Include:

· Remember Learning precedes investment-start small, learn quickly and scale rapidly.

· Stay wedded to the goal while constantly adjusting tactics. Tactical flexibility is critical in a journey that may last a decade, or more. It will not be completed without course corrections. Course corrections do not change directional consistency.

· Build collaborative capacity-Partner or perish! Success, innovation, fueled by sustainability often requires we create new relationships; mechanisms for the development of new products and sharing revenues.

Sustainability is the capacity to endure. For humans, sustainability is the long-term maintenance of well being, which has environmental, economic, and social dimensions, and encompasses the concept of stewardship, the responsible management of resource use. In ecology, sustainability describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time, a necessary precondition for human well-being. Long-lived and healthy wetlands and forests are examples of sustainable biological systems.

Human sustainability interfaces with economics through the social and ecological consequences of economic activity. Sustainable organizations, 3rd generation Family Business’s understand and work towards a TBL, triple bottom line. The triple bottom line is people, profits and planet. Working together we know that is the best is achieved over the long term with a long term vision….

It’s the voice of life that calls us to learn.

Done correctly being environmentally friendly will lower costs and lower costs increase revenues. Sustainability should be the fuel for innovation.