Sustainability Evolves from Fad To Force

Sustainability is evolving quickly to become a major force in business practices and in business models. One of the best ways to think about sustainability is the triple bottom line model. This model speaks to developing business models that can show profit in three major areas - environment, economic, and social.

Sustainability holds the seeds of much of the major innovation we will see over the next 100 years. Every aspect of business can, should, and will be transformed. This represents a serious opportunity for competitive advantage in the short term and significant profit in the long term.

On June 30, 2009, Langdon Morris, one of the founders of InnovationLabs was quoted in a CNBC article about sustainability. He mentions that for most large corporations today they need to develop what we call 'edge competence' in order to see where innovation will take place for them. This capability is challenging for large organizations with so much investment in their 'core' business.

“The problem is that change rarely originates in the core,” says Morris. “It originates at what, for them, is the edge. So while they all talk a lot about core competence, what they really need to do to maintain a viable business model is to develop ‘edge competence,’ which is the ability to see change coming and respond to it before it becomes a huge problem.”

You can read the entire article here.


(the image above was taken from AM Consortium - an energy and environment consultant).

The Innovation Economy - INGENESIST

IN this slide deck (embedded below) , Daniel Robles explains his unique vision for an Innovation Economy. His concepts of information, knowledge and innovation shown in the slide above are the driving forces for his Open Source project : Ingenesist - . You can view his presentation on this page or see a larger size version by clicking on the slideshare logo at the bottom right of the presentation .

I had run across Dan's vision over a year ago and posted on it here Thoughts Illustrated: The Great Train Wreck of Social Networks - can we be saved?

Here's the slide deck:

Innovation Economics Next

View more presentations from ingenesist. (tags: innovation economics)

Innovation in Tough Times Survey

We've put up a survey about innovation in tough times. Please take a moment and give us your input. We'll share the results with you once they are tabulated.

http://www.innovationlabs.com/innovation_survey_0109.html

Inside Apple Computer

This is a lovely little book that I heartily recommend for anyone who's interested in innovation.

It's a detailed study of the innovation process at Apple Computer, which author Leander Kahney reverse engineered by talking to people – not including Steve Jobs, apparently – and reading through the press for clues about what's goes on inside the notoriously secretive company.

I found useful ideas on nearly every page, including discussions of how the iPod was designed, the role of marketing, the story behind Apple's phenomenally successful retail stores (which many retail observers incorrectly predicted would be a total failure), and useful discussions of many other topics.

There's also the amusing nugget that "Apple doesn't have a system to harness innovation," which is obviously completely untrue. It may just be Jobs' intuition (although I doubt it), but there is definitely a system there, clear stages in the conceptualization and development process, as well as a powerful guiding philosophy based on simplicity and elegance of design.

And unfortunately, while Kahney doesn't integrate all the information he collected into a complete model of the innovation process at Apple, I've been remixing the book's many insights into a case study, and I'd be happy to email it to you if you're interested.

Contact me at lmorris [at] innovationlabs [dot] com.