How Defining your Sustainable Development Goals Can Accelerate Innovation
How can the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals create opportunities for innovation within your organisation? I explored this challenge together with Anne Marie Thodsen from the Umbrella Institute last year during a webinar attended by colleagues from the UAE, Germany, Switzerland, Lithuania, Nigeria, Spain, Denmark, Finland, France and the UK to share how SDGs can help galvanise the innovation culture within small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Corporate organisations.
“Instead of Innovation in one corner, and sustainability in another as separate teams - we can work strategically together to generate change with positive impact.” - Anne Marie Thodsen, Umbrella Institute
About the SDGs
To step back slightly, the SDGs are a to-do list of 17 global goals to achieve by 2030. They were originally made for 193 countries with the goal of increasing cooperation on sustainable development between nations and regions - the SDGs were soon found to be excellent business communication and acceleration tools. They are:
The interconnected nature of the SDGs
The SDGs can often look like a long list, however, are very interconnected. This clever model from the Stockholm Resilience Centre shows how ECONOMY, SOCIETY and BIOSPHERE all work together, and, right at the top: COOPERATION + PARTNERSHIP (SDG 17) enforces the need for cooperation and partnerships to make the rest of the goals happen.
ECONOMY
Building of the biosphere and society, the economic goals direct attention towards industry, innovation and infrastructure; reduced inequalities; responsible consumption and production; and decent work and economic growth that is decoupled from environmental degradation.
SOCIETY
The goals addressing societal issues, call for the eradication of poverty and the improvement of social justice, peace and good health. Social development depends upon a protected biosphere. In addition, the goals of clean energy, no poverty, zero hunger,peace and injustice, sustainable cities, education, gender equality and good health are the foundation for the goals related to the economy.
BIOSPHERE
Protecting the biosphere is an essential precondition for social justice and economic development. If we do not achieve the goals related to clean water and sanitation, life below water, life on land, and climate action, the world will fail to achieve the remaining goals. online can make all the difference.
UN Global Compact does a stellar job of helping companies align their ESG strategies with these universal principles. The business case for communicating with SDGs is also well clarified by SDG compass.
The power of identifying and communicating your SDGs
Organisations typically start with one or two main goals that fit their core business - but eventually, they will (and should) address parts of every SDG. But depending on your industry, it isn’t always easy to identify which SDGs you should be focusing on first.
During our session, we asked our audience of sustainably-minded professionals who among them had narrowed them down, of which 88% had already defined or were currently working on their Sustainable Development goals.
The benefits of defining your target SDGs, as Anne Marie Thodsen from the Umbrella Institute so nicely explains, is that “the SDGs represent a set of twists or loops for your company to really explore - as soon as you do, you might discover a big opportunity that you haven't identified yet.”
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CASE STUDY Palm Trees - Steelwood Industries, UAE
The UAE has approximately 40 million palm trees, each shedding around 10 kilos of leaves every year (totalling 400 million kilos). These need to be cut off or the tree dies. A decade ago, you’d throw these into the waste management system, and they would end up in a landfill.
Steelwood industry figured out a way to make these leaves into a super-strong wood board that can be reused infinitely. Throughout 2021, they captured more than 1 million metric tonnes of carbon and diverted 400 million tonnes of waste away from landfills, reduced wood imports, and created jobs through their business.
Although they didn’t set out to work with specific SDGs, they were actually working on SDG 12: reducing production and consumption, and therefore waste. They also targeted SDG 11: helping communities and cities become more sustainable, as well as SDG 13: targeting climate action. And then, of course, they created many jobs, so they are also working with SDG 8: decent work and economic development. They are now one of the first, not just net neutral, but carbon positive companies in the world.
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Anne-Marie shares that “As soon as you start to communicate SDGs - you communicate on a higher level with other companies - making connections that were difficult before as competitors. Now you start being teammates in a race and join efforts in initiatives… seeing the efficiencies and benefits together.”
Identifying SDGs - Accelerating Focus
To uncover your own SDGs, the Umbrella Institute’s online SDG Sprint allows teams from different parts of your organisation, with different seniority, to work together, asynchronously, to identify opportunities around sustainable development and aligning your vision. Once you've started, you’ll get a hunger for learning more, and seek inspiration from competitors and players from different sectors.
Turning sustainability challenges into opportunities
Once you've defined which Sustainable Development Goals to focus on, you can break them down into specific challenges that your team can actually answer. A defined challenge is crucial to opening up opportunities to innovate and rests on re-phrasing the challenge as an opportunity.
For example - instead of: “What sustainable opportunities can we find within the Steel Industry” we might turn insights into relevant questions such as: “How might we monetize our by-products from steel production?”. The latter, more targeted opportunity would propel you to seek technical inspiration from other industries, perhaps using new methods of extracting gas from the furnaces, then using user-centric methodologies to explore your existing suppliers and consumer network, identifying customers who would purchase a new by-product specifically tailored to their needs.
Customer-Centric Innovation
A prime factor of innovation is adding value to a market, so it's very important to get your market involved in your innovation - you really need to understand your customer!
Design sprints are a faster way of bringing this knowledge together and testing ideas in a quick format. This innovation process, based on Design Thinking created by Google Ventures, organises the key steps of: Map, Sketch, Decide, Prototype and Test, typically over five days, and brings together decision-makers, customers, and in some cases, partners to create a new feature, offer or process.
If looking for sustainable - perhaps more Circular Economy opportunities, for example, you would first analyse your material flow, the product life cycle, the production process and how your supply network currently engages with your process in order to fully understand and recognise where the problems are and prioritise them.
Once you’ve highlighted the key areas, e.g. To focus on reducing water consumption, you can prepare your sprint by inviting the right people into the room, and selecting which partners, suppliers or clients would be involved. Then you’d begin to collect more knowledge and feedback to define the challenge specifically, collect inspiration from within and out of the industry and ideate solutions to a specific problem.
The next step is to prepare a prototype to test the solution e.g. digital product, landing page, organisational chart, roadmap rollout, process or physical prototype which should be tested on approximately five people - the proven number which will allow you to get all the results you need. You’d then use that feedback to iterate on the product or process.
The MVP (minimal viable product: enough to prove or disprove your concept) would be developed based on this iteration and rolled out to a small section of the market to make sure it really works and starts earning money.
E.g. If you wanted to roll out a huge water saving system in Dubai, that is expensive at scale - but to incrementally roll it out, the MVP might cost $2,000. Once you've tested with one building, you would demonstrate the water savings and the cost savings with hard data from the first pilot, then iterate and roll out one building at a time rather than committing to the whole project from the beginning.
Customer-centric thinking is crucial as it demonstrates success or failure early on, rather than spending tens of thousands of dollars on a project and test it after development only for it to fail. By testing early on real customers, you'll learn, iterate, then launch a better product or service.
Design sprints reduce product development time and budgets by about 75%, accelerating solution rollouts thanks to incremental changes to a validated solution. So, focusing on the user helps market success by accelerating time to market.
Fostering an internal innovation culture
Experimenting through design sprints and other innovation processes improves your company’s innovation culture, firstly because of cross-departmental collaboration, secondly, because design thinking and agile methods teach entrepreneurial themes like prioritisation, delegation and breaks old habits. Instead of just having pointless meetings and presentations, and the long process to get product funding, you can actually say to the CEO, “We've tested this idea on five of our key users. They have all said that they would get involved and purchase 10 water-saving machines over the next six months, can we create this project?” And then they can't say no, it's a really strong argument.
Crucially, however, if the solution has come from within your team, there'll be an increased commitment to this change as opposed to it coming from an outsourced agency.
Conclusion
So, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are a really exciting tool to create opportunities for innovation within your organisation beyond optimisation. You can align on which goals are the right ones to focus on through collaboration throughout your organisation (through SDG sprints if in doubt!), defining specific challenges with analysis and mapping, then experimenting through short cycles of customer-centric design sprints. And, there's nothing wrong with starting somewhere - don’t expect to be perfectly sustainable from day one!
Please get in touch if you’d like to experiment with sustainable opportunities in your organisation or find out more here.
