Mar 02

Creative Capacity of Social Business Models

Posted in: Articles

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I’m excited that there is an increased interest in creativity in business thinking these days. But what I worry about, and what I’ve been worrying about for years, is what the creative outcome from it will be. What I’m afraid of is that creatives are coming to the table simply to make more fancy do-dads for the top 1% of the economic pyramid. But could I be wrong? Will they instead make a more meaningful contribution?

Below are a few innovative business models from the world market that promote what I see as a laudable combination of creativity and social responsibility. I want to shine a light on these examples and offer some thoughts on how to be inspired by them, in your own business ventures.

MICRO ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Oorja Stove
Micro Entrepreneurship is a type of business that creates jobs for poor people. One of the most elegant applications of this principle that I’ve seen is Oorja Stove. The product in and of itself is innovative because it helps people who traditionally cook on wood fires, which is bad for health and environment, transition to cooking on fires made from agricultural waste pellets. But what is most innovative about this stove is how it’s distributed and sold: It is designed so that sales can be handled by people within the communities in which the products are sold, a door-to-door sales force.

TIP: If you are thinking about creating a new product or service, then think about how your venture could be designed so that it creates jobs for people who need them.

BUY ONE, GIVE ONE
Toms Shoes
Buy One, Give One is a business model in which for every product sold, another product is given to someone who needs it. Toms Shoes, for example, is a shoe company that gives away a pair of shoes for every pair that is sold and the shoes have a distinct look that is now instantly recognizable precisely as a charitable product. As far as corporate philanthropy goes, this model is the most creative because the charitable giving is not hidden in an annual report but becomes symbolically embedded in the product itself. The shoes empower the purchasers to take pride in their own charitable contribution and to spread awareness about the mission of the company.

TIP: If you are thinking about including charitable giving in your business, then think about doing it in a way that delivers not only the charity but an awareness about the cause.

HYPERLOCAL COLLECTIVES
Good Food Collective
This model is being employed by local farmers in New York State and I hope in other places. Local farmers have a tough time competing with factory farmers in the market. So these local farmers band together to share resources, knowledge, marketing power and distribution channels. The Good Food Collective is in its third year of coordinating sales between local farms and local consumers. Another successful example of a food collective is Full Plate Collective, just outside of Ithaca, NY.

TIP: If you are developing a product or service that is trying to compete with similar offerings from global mega-corporations, then form a hyperlocal collective to share resources with like-minded businesses in your region.

KNOWLEDGE SHARING
Toyota Ideas for Good
This model is an alternative to the currently prevalent model that compels stakeholders to protect their intellectual property (IP) at all cost. In contrast to that model, for example, Toyota and other Japanese car companies have received a lot of recognition for how they share knowledge with each other. How it works is that competing companies get together and share technological breakthroughs, then go back to their respective labs and implement the technologies in different ways. The competing companies decided that sharing knowledge was in the best interest for all of them. I am excited to see that Toyota is extending this knowledge sharing concept to users, with its ‘Ideas for Good’ campaign, a knowledge-sharing campaign that asks users to apply the technology to areas outside the car industry.

TIP: If your business offers an innovation that has a potential to make positive change in the world, then think about sharing that innovation with as many people as you can and asking for their creative input.

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Mar 01

Dr. Michael Braungart on Material Shortages and Designing a New Material World

Posted in: Articles

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Recent events around the world expose the heightened uncertainties of a growing demand for materials that are both precious and in limited supply.

With China exporting as much as 96 percent of the world’s supply of rare earth metals, the country’s drastic reduction in exports sent ripples around the world. Simultaneously, governments such as the United States continue to subsidize biomass for energy, causing domestic shortages and the need to import biomass from other countries.

These trends are particularly disconcerting when viewed in the context of increased use of incineration to create fuel. The practice of incinerating waste for energy, though efficient in the short term, exacerbates the issue of materials shortages. When burning waste for fuel, many valuable and recoverable materials are lost through the smokestack that could otherwise be re-used within new product life cycles.

As governments respond to these materials shortages and imbalances by promoting conventional materials supply strategies such as increased domestic drilling, stockpiling and diversification of supply sources, there is an urgent need to call into question the basic assumption of nature’s limitless supply and to deliver innovative approaches to materials management.

In this conversation with Maren Maier of Catalyst Design Review and Allan Chochinov, Editor-in-Chief of Core77.com, Dr. Michael Braungart, along with the EPEA research team encourages designers to more fully understand material flows and learn how to capture material assets at every part of the life cycle. Design can pioneer the next revolution in business, but it will need to reframe old assumptions and shape desire to the contours of a real and living world.

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How can designers shape desire for a new materiality based on the real limits of our real world?

Dr. Braungart: Well, first, the business community does not have enough respect for designers. They are currently at the bottom of the management food chain. Marketing tells them what to do. That doesn’t make any sense.

Designers hold a key to the future, but designers need to understand their role differently and learn to have more self-esteem, ambition and responsibility. For example, why are designers designing desire for toys made of materials that contain dozens of chemicals? Why are designers designing desire for electronics that use our increasingly limited supply of rare minerals?

The role of design does seem to be shifting in business though. There is a perception here in the United States that designers have more of a seat at the table now and are being recognized for their strategic abilities. What is your feeling about this? How do relationships between designers, scientists, business managers and even regulators need to be redefined?

We are beginning to understand that everybody is a designer, because design is the first signal of human intention. The question is: What is the role of the design professional and what are the responsibilities of that role? I believe that design needs to intend, at the beginning, to be good instead of less bad. If design does not do that, we will need more and more legislation just to limit the amount of poison we put in the air or in the water. But legislation is really a sign of design failure.

Designers must consider the consequences of their choice of materials. This is not complex. As scientists, we can alert them to the consequences. We can tell them what happens when certain materials go into the environment. I see myself as the ‘material boy,’ as Madonna would say, for designers. They simply need to say, “I want to use that material, what is the consequence of that?”

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