The 360° Approach: Sustainability, Innovation, and Growth

When we talk about sustainability and innovation, it’s important to first clarify what sustainability is. Is it simply about ensuring things can stick around for another year, decade, century, or millennium? At its core, people tend to agree that sustainability is about fulfilling the needs of current generations without compromising the needs of future generations. As an organization, you want to ensure that this is done while maintaining a desired level of growth, no matter what that  “growth” is geared toward for the organization in question. It can be everything from financial gains and intellectual stimuli to member diversification. Then we need to ensure that the company has innovation management at its core to fulfill its sustainability mission!

Innovation360, in collaboration with BMNP Strategies LLC, is proud to announce the launch of Sustainnovation360™. It is a unique new assessment system to help organizations improve their innovating capabilities to ensure they can enjoy sustainable outcomes and benefits.

How to innovate for sustainability and drive green transformation

Sustainability-orientated innovation (SOI) – also called green innovation or eco-innovation – is any innovation undertaken for the purpose, either primary or secondary, of achieving environmental-sustainability benefits. SOI includes innovations undertaken to reduce the consumption of resources or energy, lower GHG emissions, or other forms of pollution, implement circular or restorative business models, protect biodiversity, etc.

Whether a company needs to innovate to ensure they have more sustainable products, production, or operational processes, this powerful new tool will start by assessing the progress already made, then identify which particular capabilities the company should invest in next to achieve its sustainability goals.

Inside My360, you will find resources related to our insights and learning certificates in sustainable development, where you will be able to test drive the SOI solution by generating a sample report. You will also find sources about ideation, experimentation, managing innovation, installing an Innovation Management System, and much more. 

Innovation should not be elitist. It is for everyone. We mean that in two ways. First, no one should think that this is a special talent possessed by only a lucky few. Everyone can learn how to innovate successfully. It’s a science—not a mad science like alchemy, but rather a good science like chemistry. All it takes is the right combination of the right elements to innovate successfully. Once those elements are in place, a company can replicate the process over and over again. After all, no company can depend on a single great idea for very long. A culture of innovation is required to win consistently in a rapidly changing market.

Secondly, we must recognize that innovation can and must do far more for us than just helping a single company become a bit more efficient. Our entire planet needs to think more innovatively if we hope to prevent a potentially catastrophic future.

Massive possibilities

We have before us incredible possibilities. However, we also face tremendous uncertainties. Our technological mastery has given us the knowledge and tools to alter our DNA, live in space, and be connected, via a device in our hands, to potentially everyone everywhere, all at once.

This connectedness has massively reshaped the world and will continue to do so at an accelerating pace, ultimately transforming all spheres of human life.

No one can predict

Basically, no one can entirely predict what our future will look like. We can be sure that the world our children and grandchildren will live in will be unimaginably different from our own.

Although mankind’s potential is enormous, our ability to build new technologies often outpaces our capacity to think critically about them, much less use them strategically to solve problems and create value.

This is why we need innovation and, with it, a common framework and language to manage the innovation strategy.

What My360 is about

This is what My360 is about. It starts with introductory training on innovation, then explores how innovation is being practiced in the real world and what happens to companies when innovative thinking is rejected, ultimately considering the most advanced applications and practices available. Our offerings cover everything from Innovation Training to certification and accreditation programs in assessments, innovation, sustainability courses, and transformation programs.

Together, in our courses and accreditation programs, we analyze exactly what went wrong with recent high-profile failures, like those at Volkswagen, Toys“R”Us, and Kodak. We study what went right at companies that rose from the brink of disaster, like Harley-Davidson, LEGO, and Ericsson. Moreover, we analyze companies that have survived for decades by completely reinventing themselves, like Samsung, IBM, and Apple. Above all, we look at companies where we have personally been involved in hitting the reset button by helping business leaders think innovatively.

Don’t listen to your customers!

Many of the lessons we have learned during our experiences have been actually counterintuitive (“Don’t listen to your customers!”). At the same time, some others took us by surprise (Chinese firms overall scored higher for innovative capabilities than Swedish ones). We have dedicated our lives to following the data no matter where it leads, and this has revealed many surprises. Now we want to share with you the results of our journeys in innovation rescue and invite you to help us fix the planet.

Holistic approach for sustainability and innovation 

Environmental scientists tell us that the kind of change that will make a difference in our outcomes will also require a massive reset in how we live, work, consume, and share resources. The need for innovative thinking has never been more intense, and that’s just as true for individual companies as it is for the world as a whole.

We face a devastating loss of biodiversity, the destruction of coastal cities, and an energy and production system that is removing resources from the Earth faster than they can be replenished. Millions around the world have been lifted out of poverty and have joined the globe in causing changes, and these changes need to be rolled back to protect the globe.

The great grand challenges

We believe that innovation can solve the challenges we face, but we can’t leave it to chance. Resolving to create a better world means committing to sustainability, equality, and evidence-based standards and best practices.

Everything we need already exists, but we must find different ways of thinking and working and establish a common framework and vocabulary.

While every innovator ultimately finds their own way to success, innovators generally use the same set of elements in new combinations. But from the simplest of elements and rules arises infinite complexity.

DNA and innovation

Human DNA is the perfect example of a system. With the simplest of elements and rules but from which infinite complexity arises, it is made up of four nucleotides, adenine (A), guanine (G), thymine (T), and cytosine (C). A few basic rules control how they attach to each other, A with T, G with C. Yet those rules and elements determine the essential characteristics of all 8 billion people alive today; indeed, everyone who has ever lived and everyone who will ever live.

Welcome to My360 and a journey in sustainable growth, innovation, and transformation. Sign up today.