Exploring the need for more radical sustainable innovation: what does it look like and why?

Abstract

It has been argued in recent years that Western economies need to increase their resource productivity by 90% over the next 50 years. This is a radical aim. This paper draws on design for sustainability (DfS) thinking to scope interventions that encourage greater levels of resource productivity through reconfiguring concepts of growth and well‐being within organisational strategies, structures, systems, processes and outputs. Based on research from a UK EPSRC funded project Design Dialogues (2005–2008), this paper links together sustainable design and innovation literatures and dialogue‐based primary research that together inform the development of an approach to innovation for sustainability. The emphasis on sustainable innovation is to understand what is designed (the outputs of business) and why (the inputs: the values, beliefs, visions and objectives) within a context of ecological limits. The foundations of this approach are introduced here in order to demonstrate the potential to provoke a new way of thinking about longer‐term organisational innovation through making explicit the intrinsic connections between natural and human capitals. This paper explores the need to think differently in order to create sustainability and presents the outcome of this research: a methodology for innovation for sustainability.

Keywords:

• sustainable innovation
• design for sustainability
• Factor 10
• ecological limits
• creating sustainability
• organisational culture

Acknowledgements

The research team would like to thank the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)2 for funding the research project Design Dialogues: An exploratory study of design narratives, methodologies and tools towards achieving Factor 10 outcomes [2005–2008]. We would also like to thank those individuals and organisations that generously gave of their time to create the dialogues that have informed much of this work.

Notes

1. Within both the academic and professional design communities Design Thinking describes a people‐focused and systemic approach to creative activity aimed at solving problems and fostering better solutions for all (English 2006).

2. Further information on the UK EPSRC funded Design Dialogues project can be found at: http://www.creatingsustainability.org.uk