The need for sustainable ideas and solutions is becoming increasingly urgent for companies. Two key factors in particular are driving companies to find solutions: scarcity of resources and regulatory requirements.
The increasing scarcity of resources requires innovative material alternatives and a rethink of our economy from linear to circular in order to put waste to rest and use resources effectively. In addition, increasingly stringent environmental and social regulations are creating a legal incentive for companies to comply with sustainable practices.
Finding sustainable ideas and solutions will be a competitive advantage for companies that not only strive for minimum legal requirements, but also want to increase their customer loyalty and tap into new markets. For companies that want to survive tomorrow, sustainable solutions are therefore not a ‘nice to have’, but a ‘must have’.
The role of creativity in the discovery of sustainable ideas
Creativity is essential when it comes to finding sustainable ideas and solutions. It plays a decisive role for companies that want to integrate sustainability in all areas. Creativity is the catalytic spark that encourages us to think beyond the status quo, to question the foundations of our actions and to search for better ways.
In the smallest case, creativity already means when you have noticed a new approach to a problem. Creativity means taking many small steps towards a solution. The realization will grow that creativity is a treasure for advancing sustainability in the company and involving employees in this development through their wealth of ideas. Because scientifically, we are all more or less equally creative. Many of us just have to learn it again – and fortunately creativity can be encouraged and trained at any age.
Creativity as a catalyst for more sustainability helps us to…
- develop innovative materials and technologies that are more effective and leave a smaller or even a positive ecological footprint. In the form of new product designs, production processes or energy sources, this can lead to a significant reduction in our environmental impact.
- develop new, more sustainable business models. Business models that are circular and restorative and thus create added value for companies, customers and the planet.
- design sustainable processes within the company and its ecosystem of partners. Companies can use creative approaches to design processes that promote both environmental and social responsibility. Creativity can help us to completely rethink and redesign the way we work.
Ultimately, the use of creativity can enable companies to break new ground and thus create sustainable value that goes far beyond the products or services themselves. Creativity is the key to sustainable ideas and solutions that can have a positive and lasting impact on business success as well as on ecological and social systems.
Innovation workshops: An effective tool for generating sustainable ideas
We can see innovation workshops in companies as a tool for developing sustainable ideas. As structured, interactive events, they bring together people from different areas of a company to explore new perspectives, solve complex problems and find exciting solutions.
As a form of employee engagement, such workshops provide a safe environment where all participants are encouraged to think outside the box and share ideas without fear of criticism or rejection. In this creative space, different viewpoints and experiences are used in a targeted manner to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the challenges and opportunities surrounding sustainability.
A key aspect of this is the interdisciplinary nature of the participants. The involvement of different departments and hierarchical levels creates a diverse pool of knowledge and perspectives, which makes it possible to develop sustainable solutions that go beyond the boundaries of individual departments and can have a positive impact on the entire company.
Such innovation workshops are also exciting from a cultural change perspective. They promote an understanding and willingness for more sustainability, demonstrate the importance of openness, cooperation and joint continuous improvement and motivate people to anchor these values in their everyday working lives.
To take full advantage of innovation workshops, careful planning and implementation is crucial – either by trained internal facilitators or with external support. It needs clear objectives, the right mix of participants and the right methods.
Finding the right focus in the innovation workshop
In every innovation workshop, the focus and objective should first be clarified. This requires the definition of clear workshop objectives in advance: What do we want to achieve in this innovation workshop? What specific problem in the area of sustainability do we want to solve? What do we want to find ideas for? Experience has shown that several smaller, targeted innovation workshops for a specific sustainability problem with the appropriate interdisciplinary group of participants are worthwhile in order to develop more concrete and practicable ideas.
The first step is to phrase the sustainability problems identified in the company into a question, a so-called key question or “how-might-we” question. Here are some examples from different areas of the company:
- Problem: High energy consumption in production facilities leads to considerable CO2 emissions and high operating costs.
Key question: How can we increase our energy efficiency in the xxx production facility by 30% within the next two years? - Problem: High paper consumption leads to unnecessary waste and environmental impact, and there is a need for more efficient and secure data storage and access.
Key question: How can we make our offices “paperless” to minimize the need for physical documents while ensuring information accessibility and security? - Problem: The corporate culture does not sufficiently promote sustainable behavior and thinking among employees.
Key question: How can we create a corporate culture that promotes commitment and personal responsibility for sustainability among employees? - Problem: The company has no systematic approach to measuring and improving its sustainability performance.
Key question: How can we introduce a comprehensive sustainability management system that enables continuous improvement and is communicated transparently?
The 17 verrocchio SDG Challenger Cards help you to find further good guiding questions for more sustainability. For each UN Sustainable Development Goal, they provide five suitable guiding questions for companies to pursue the global sustainability goals with their own company’s offering.
2 sample SDG Challenger Cards (German only)
Once the key question for the innovation workshop has been set, the actual brainstorming begins. An environment should be created in which everyone feels comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas without fear of criticism. At this early stage, the aim is to collect as many ideas as possible, not to evaluate them. Idea generation, idea evaluation and idea selection are individual, consecutive steps and must be clearly separated from one another.
Brainstorming for sustainability: Or how to do it better
Brainstorming is often used in teams to collect new ideas. However, this technique is actually more suitable for experienced and well-coordinated teams – because it will cause silent participants to hardly get a chance to speak and the brainstorming process can quickly go round in circles or get lost in the details of implementation. There are much better creativity techniques, especially in an innovation workshop with participants from different backgrounds, that produce results that achieve their goals. It is important to know what creativity techniques actually do.
They …
- … increase the amount of ideas per unit of thinking time.
- … are no guarantee for finding the desired “solution”.
- … increase the probability by a lot that new, useful ideas will be found.
- … are search rules that stimulate thoughts in individuals or groups.
To find sustainable ideas, I can recommend three different creativity techniques to start with. These techniques can be used alone or in combination in an innovation workshop to ensure that the participants get creative and come up with as many ideas as possible for the defined key question:
1. brainwriting pool – using your own pool of knowledge
In this method, everyone writes ideas on post-its in silence. The ideas are then passed around the circle of participants and enriched by each person. You can find more about the method and instructions here in our Innovation Wiki.
2. SDG Impulse Cards – what others are already doing
The verrochio SDG Impulse Cards provide short, concrete impulses for each of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals to help generate ideas for more sustainability in the company. A collection of examples from other companies is directly accessible via a QR code on the cards. The cards can either help participants to come up with new ideas right from the start or open up new impulses in between.
3. sustainable inspiration cards – short, sustainable inspirations
The verrocchio Sustainable Inspiration Cards provide short, new sustainable perspectives and, with 130 cards, are a collection of external inspirations for thinking about ideas in a more ecological and social way. Participants are encouraged to think outside the box and approach sustainability from different perspectives.
To broaden the participants’ horizons and provide external impulses and inspiration, you can also use your own research to find and compile inspiring examples of companies that have introduced innovative sustainable practices. The important thing is: If the ideas remain too generic and unambitious, you should offer the participants incentives to break out of their usual thought patterns.
Open innovation and crowdsourcing for sustainability
To further increase the variety of perspectives, expertise and creative approaches and to go beyond the boundaries of your own company, open innovation and crowdsourcing are other great tools for generating sustainable ideas and solutions alongside internal innovation workshops.
Open innovation refers to systematic access to external knowledge and ideas to promote innovation. In terms of sustainability, this can mean working with universities, start-ups, NGOs or even competitors to develop new environmentally friendly technologies, explore sustainable business models or minimize social impact. This includes, for example, research projects with universities to investigate sustainable materials or collaboration with start-ups that develop innovative solutions for a green economy.
Crowdsourcing, on the other hand, refers to the involvement of a broad mass of people in the innovation process, be it through ideas competitions, customer feedback or co-creation workshops. For example, companies can invite their customers to an innovation workshop to find more sustainable solutions for their products/services together in a “co-creation” process. In this way, the customer perspective is immediately incorporated in order to continue developing valuable products/services for customers and the planet.
However, the introduction of open innovation and crowdsourcing requires companies to be prepared to relinquish control, create transparency and value external contributions. The management must also be aware of this: If such a variety of ideas are developed through innovation workshops, open innovation and crowdsourcing, there is also the expectation that ideas will be implemented in concrete measures.
No point without implementation
Yes – brainstorming and (re)discovering your own creativity is fun, but it also requires a subsequent, effective selection of ideas in order to allocate resources to the right projects and not get carried away. Among other things, this should be taken into account:
- which ideas contribute to our strategy
- Which ideas have the greatest social/ecological impact
- which ideas are new and sustainable in our industry or even in the world
- which ideas have great economic potential
- Which ideas can be implemented in period xxx with budget xxx and team size
After all, no matter how many sustainable ideas and solutions there are, they are of no use if the most promising ones are not translated into concrete actions and projects. Otherwise, brainstorming can quickly be dismissed as “innovation theater” and “greenwashing” and employee frustration increases.
Any company that says A (I want to find new, sustainable ideas and solutions) must also say B (I will implement selected ideas and show that we are serious about sustainability).
