TNNWC Publications: sustainability

Showing posts with label sustainability. Show all posts

Monday, June 27, 2011

Introducing Eric Lowitt, Jessan Dunn Otis and Tony Humphrey | A NOTE FROM THE FOUNDER

Introducing Eric Lowitt, Jessan Dunn Otis and Tony Humphrey

by Adam J. Kovitz

Those of you who have been reading The National Networker Weekly Newsletter (TNNW) for a long time know that we don't like sitting on our laurels. We are always pushing to find better ways to bring you better, more relevant stories related to entrepreneurship, independent business ownership and emerging enterprise.

Why?

Because it's the entrepreneurial thing to do! We must always continue to challenge the status quo, even if it's our own. It's not only what makes us special, it's what separates us from our big business counterparts, which is why we drive innovation, jobs and stability and they don't. And, yes...I am proud to say that!

I am also proud to introduce three new writers to TNNW, each with their own unique styles and areas of expertise.

First up is Eric Lowitt, TNNWC's Strategy and Sustainability Senior Advisor and noted speaker and author who has been published in Forbes.com, Business Strategy Review, the Journal of Business Strategy, Inside Supply Management, and Corporate Governance, as well as news wires, industry publications and other media outlets. Eric is the author of the upcoming book, The Future of Value (Jossey-Bass, October 2011). Eric debuts his new column this week; Sustainability, Entrepreneurship and The Future of Value with an article entitled "How to Keep Ahead of Sustainability's Twists and Turns".

Next is Jessan Dunn Otis, who I affectionately call the "Garrison Keillor of Rhode Island". Jessan works as a freelance writer and publicist and has been an Adjunct Professor and Visiting Lecturer/Artist at Bryant University, Community College of Rhode Island, Rhode Island School of Design, The Cambridge School and other institutions. As a published poet since 1987, she's had readings at Brown University, Villa Serbelloni, CAV, Writer's Harvest and other venues. It's as an independent business owner and entrepreneur that she debuts her new column Convey Your Message this week with the article "What's your Message? Who's your Audience".

Lastly, we have Tony Humphrey, a.k.a "The Top Hand" at TheTopTravelClub.com, a discount travel club, much like a Sam's Club or Costco for world travel. Once a Chartered Accountant, Tony's passion for travel and leisure led him to connect with several international entrepreneurs who own their own destination spots in his new line of work, which he will be focusing upon in his new column The Business of Leisure and his article "Introducing the Business of Leisure".

Just to sum things up, June has been a tremendously, busy month for us at TNNWC, beginning with the launch of our new website, and culminating with three new writers. There are plenty of more surprises in store for you over the next several weeks, so please do stay tuned and tell your colleagues about The National Networker. They'll be glad you did.

Who says things slow down in the summer?

All my best,

Adam

www.TNNWC.com

www.TheNationalNetworker.com

http://adamjkovitz.blogspot.com

Monday, June 13, 2011

3 Rules for Crowdsourcing Your Sustainability Projects | SUSTAINABILITY, ENTREPRENEURSHIP, AND THE FUTURE OF VALUE

Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Value with Eric Lowitt

A new trend in the corporate pursuit of sustainability has emerged: crowd-sourcing via social media.
While adoption has been easy, gaining useful ideas has not. By looking at three recent efforts -- GE's Smart Grid challenge, eBay's Green Team, and a leading European retailer's green customer foray -- three rules for companies considering crowd-sourcing of sustainability ideas are coming into focus.

Recently one of Europe's leading retailers launched an online campaign which sought ideas from its customers as to how the company could further its sustainability efforts. I spoke with the company's sustainability lead under the condition of anonymity to learn how the drive for ideas went. She noted that "the response rate was higher than expected, but the ideas were either generic or impractical." A sampling of the ideas included "use less energy," "recycle more," and "eliminate packaging." They have since closed the campaign with minimal to-dos stemming from the campaign.

Compare the retailer's experience with crowd-sourcing efforts at GE and eBay. GE launched the "GE ecomagination Challenge: Powering the Grid" in July 2010 with much fanfare. After all the company, along with four prominent venture capital firms, put up $200 million to fund ideas from society writ large to accelerate the development and adoption of a smart grid. GE created a new website for the effort, incorporated aspects of social media, and installed a committee to decide which ideas to fund.

Between July 13 and September 30, 2010, nearly 4,000 ideas were submitted; collectively these ideas garnered over 70,000 comments from nearly 70,000 registered users. Every idea was publicly available to both review and support. Jeff Immelt publicly announced the winners of the ecomagination Challenge on December 2nd.

Like GE, eBay created a Green Team program and website to tap into the wisdom of crowds. The program's mission is to "inspire the world to buy, sell and think green every day." To date, over 300,000 sellers -- individuals who sell goods on eBay's platform -- have signed up to share ideas and views aimed at making eBay a greener sales partner.

The eBay Box, a corrugated cardboard box designed to be durable enough to be used by sellers over and over again, is among the ideas that came from this community and have been rolled out.

So how can companies emulate GE and eBay's success while avoiding the challenges faced by the European retailer? Follow these three rules:

1. Be painfully clear about the results you want from your campaign.

The European retailer's campaign fell flat in part because it wanted basic ideas. While they might not have explicitly said that, they didn't provide any rules of substance to guide their participants' thinking. GE clearly indicated the three categories of ideas they sought (ideas for Renewable Energy, Grid Efficiency, EcoHomes/EcoBuildings). These guidelines served a dual purpose: they led to self-selection of respondents (you're less likely to respond to a smart grid call for ideas if you aren't versed in the smart grid) and they directed respondents to submit best thinking in a focused area.

2. Embrace transparency.

Transparency helps promote trust -- it's easy to trust someone who doesn't have anything to hide. If your company runs a campaign but doesn't publicly display the results, then [potential] participants are left to draw one of three conclusions. Either your company: didn't receive any ideas, isn't paying enough attention to the "what should we do after we receive ideas" activity or doesn't believe the ideas received are good enough to be published. In each of these three scenarios, the observer is less likely to participate. To nurture dialogue among participants and embrace transparency, GE and eBay created websites to document the ideas submitted by participants.

3. Link the campaign to co-value creation.

GE and eBay implicitly demonstrated their belief that participants' time is valuable. They did this by asking participants to contribute their best thinking to create initiatives that can not only enhance the company's financial and sustainability performance, but also enhance an aspect of participants" lives. In GE's case respondents had the opportunity to pitch ideas in return for funding to pursue those ideas. And in eBay's case, sellers were asked for ideas that would help grow their businesses in a sustainable manner -- a classic example of aligning eBay's sellers' interests with the company's interests.

Crowd-sourcing sustainability ideas through social media is a low-risk, low-cost tactic to enhance sustainability performance. By following these three rules, companies will increase the likelihood of a successful crowd-sourcing campaign.

Eric Lowitt is a student and teacher of strategy and sustainability – how companies grow, innovate, and become more agile by embracing sustainability. His first book on the topic, The Future of Value, will be published by Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint, in September 2011.
Learn more about Eric Lowitt at EricLowitt.com and follow him on Twitter @EricLowitt

For more information, please visit Eric's TNNWC Bio.

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3 Ways to Profit from Sustainable Consumption and Redefining Ownership | SUSTAINABILITY, ENTREPRENEURSHIP, AND THE FUTURE OF VALUE

Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Value with Eric Lowitt

Innovation sparks industry transformation. The two main kinds of innovation that can alter consumption behavior are technology and type of ownership. Disruptive technologies — automobiles, digital signals and the like — lead to shifts in what consumers buy. New methods of ownership — leasing in markets where buying is the de facto means of ownership — lead to shifts in how consumers buy. And market shares migrate in hordes to companies that can effectively combine both tactics.

Witness the movie rental market. Companies such as Blockbuster and West Coast Video "leased" physical video tapes to consumers to watch for a few days. Today companies like Netflix that distribute copies of movies online are putting Blockbuster and the like out of business. Netflix succeeded by combining a disruptive technology (digital signals) with a new ownership model (rent-as-much-as-you-like monthly subscriptions).

Sustainability is sparking creative thinking in the methods of ownership category of innovation. Such action could lower consumption’s environmental impact with limited financial investment. Recently Best Buy introduced a Buy Back option whereby consumers can buy the right to return, at a future date, a product at 10-50 percent of the product’s value. This model could reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill and the amount of new, so-called virgin, materials needed to meet our growing consumption hunger. Best Buy’s initiative shows how sustainability, when thought about holistically, can lead to innovation and, potentially, enhanced profitability.

What other markets are ripe for this shift to a pseudo leasing arrangement? Let’s focus on U.S. consumption of physical goods (it’s hard to return a "used" service). According to the U.S. Census Bureau, consumers spent $55 billion on drugs and health aids (the highest category of individual consumer expenditures outside automobiles), $23 billion on computer hardware and software, and $12 billion on furniture. Clearly these markets are big enough to justify exploration of a leased instead of owned consumption model.

Drugs and health aids won’t be leased anytime soon. Computers are often leased in the business-to-business market, but the method has failed at least once (remember PeoplePC?) in the individual consumer market. Furniture can and is leased.

Could pseudo leasing arrangements succeed in other individual consumer markets, such as the clothing, sporting goods or books markets? Possibly, but it’s important to remember that the leasing model’s success is based on the retail company’s ability to earn a profit on the arrangement.

Profit from lease-like arrangements can be earned in at least three ways. The first is increasing the number of times an item can be sold at an incremental profit. College textbooks, which tend to be quite expensive, are beginning to be leased. A student can lease a textbook at a lower price than the outright purchase price. Upon return, the textbook leasing company can lease the book again, and so on throughout the book’s useful life. Chegg.com is one example of such a company.

The second way is by leasing an item to a consumer at a price that is greater than the reduction in the value of the product at the end of the lease arrangement. This model has worked for years in the auto industry. But when was the last time you leased, say, an item of clothing? Probably for a wedding or once-in-a-lifetime event. After all in the clothing market, the leasing model works for high-end items, such as tuxedos and wedding dresses. But such an arrangement doesn’t work for a casual pair of jeans, let alone a t-shirt or socks.

Such prima facie evidence suggests that an item has to be priced high enough for businesses to make money on leasing instead of outright selling. A $20 item is unlikely to be leasable at a price that returns a meaningful profit. Then is society doomed to a future of overpopulated landfills as a means to ensure companies are profitable? Perhaps not, as the Best Buy example suggests.

Best Buy can resell or recycle (and potentially resell the materials to manufacturers) the item to garner such an additional revenue stream. The key is to find an additional way for the retailer to be paid. This is where selling used materials back to manufacturers, the third approach to profitability in the leasing model, links sustainability with economics. This approach’s success is based on the used material being more affordable to source and use than virgin materials.

If materials’ prices continue to rise, the used material as sourced material approach will become more economically attractive to companies and potentially consumers alike. Companies that explore and perfect this model in markets where buying is the only option might have an opportunity to grow and capture market share. At worst the global pursuit of sustainability will be the main beneficiary.

Eric Lowitt is a student and teacher of strategy and sustainability – how companies grow, innovate, and become more agile by embracing sustainability. His first book on the topic, The Future of Value, will be published by Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint, in September 2011.

Learn more about Eric Lowitt at EricLowitt.com and follow him on Twitter @EricLowitt

For more information, please visit Eric's TNNWC Bio.

Powered By TNNWC Group™

Capital, Traffic Building, International Customers and unique SERVICES.
The National Networker Publications™ produced by TNNWC Group, LLC

Forward/Share This Article With Colleagues And Social Media:

Monday, June 27, 2011

Introducing Eric Lowitt, Jessan Dunn Otis and Tony Humphrey | A NOTE FROM THE FOUNDER

Monday, June 13, 2011

3 Rules for Crowdsourcing Your Sustainability Projects | SUSTAINABILITY, ENTREPRENEURSHIP, AND THE FUTURE OF VALUE

3 Ways to Profit from Sustainable Consumption and Redefining Ownership | SUSTAINABILITY, ENTREPRENEURSHIP, AND THE FUTURE OF VALUE

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