Disruptive Environmental Innovation?

I watched PBS Nova "car of the future" last night which I had recorded earlier. The show focused on reducing carbon emissions and included pretty standard stuff - bio-fuels, hybrids, reducing weight, hydrogen, plug-in hybrids, etc. What really hit me though was the section on plug-in hybrids and the contrast between the people at Tesla Motors and the group developing GM's Volt, both plug-in electric cars (which I think will emerge as the winner of all the alt-fuel options). The Tesla is not only a very cool car (left), but if successful, it might represent the perfect example of how the theory of disruptive technology and the environment collide.

The theory of disruptive technologies or disruptive innovation was developed by Clayton Christiansen of Harvard and made popular in his book "The Innovator's Dilemma." The theory (in my words, not his) is that big companies add lots of features and cost to their products and move up-market, building infrastructure and culture to support this along the way. Innovators come in down-market with new technology, lower cost and eat the big guys' lunch, and the big guys can never switch gears and compete because of that infrastructure and culture.

In the Nova episode, the founder of Tesla says something like "we want to be the next big car company. Isn't that crazy?". But is it?

Replace "environment" with "cost" in the disruptive innovation theory and maybe it is not. Perhaps innovative companies can compete solely on the environmental impact of their products, because they can build entire culture and infrastructure at much lower cost than existing companies. Think about the cost of change that GM must incur to switch. Think about old-school Detroit manufacturing and contrast it with Tesla, who started in Silicon Valley because they recognized that the software and firmware are the most important elements of the car.

Will Tesla be the next GM? Probably more important to you, is what young, innovative company might be out there right now planning environmentally sound products at low cost that compete with you?

Membership Has Its Privileges

Part of the foundation of Viridus is our belief that the most valuable discussion happens between experts in their fields. This is why Viridus is a members-only community and why we go through all the trouble to screen applicants so that you get the benefits of experts helping experts with green issues at work.

Anyone who's visited a public message board on stocks and investments knows the pitfalls of open communities. Would a doctor visit WebMD for advice on treating bladder cancer? Probably not. But they would visit Sermo, a 65,000-strong doctors-only community. Both have information on the topic, but clearly Sermo is a stronger, more trusted resource. Other members-only sites that deliver really valuable tips and advice to users include TheFunded, a site of over 7500 startup CEOs, InMobile, a community for executives in the wireless industry and TheLadders, a site for $100K+ jobs. TheFunded is a good example of how excluding certain interests (namely of venture capitalists) allows members to have real and candid conversations as opposed to merely exchanging platitudes for fear an investor might overhear). InMobile is a good example of bringing together professionals that otherwise find it difficult to connect with each other.

What's the main difference between public and members-only communities? I think the biggest difference is that public sites value quantity whereas members-only sites value quality. Think about Alexa, Compete and Google Analytics and what they measure. The standard metrics of audience (monthly uniques, page views, CPM, etc.) just don't mean anything in private sites. Instead, metrics around quality are important (we'll blog more on this later). And most importantly, to users of the sites, the experience on a members-only site is helpful, enriching and timely.

So who are members of Viridus? Viridites are business professionals for whom sustainability is all or part of their responsibility and their primary focus is on their own organization. What does that mean? Well, in short, that means no press, no vendors, no regulators and no NGOs. But then like most things in life, screening applicants is easier said than done. We have spent a lot of time developing tools to enforce our membership rules. What exactly are they? Well, I guess I have to say that's part of our special sauce, but I plan to blog more on this topic in the future. In the meantime, feel free to comment or drop me a line.

Red Sox Go Green

Our beloved Red Sox go green!

Fenway Park — the home of the Boston Red Sox — has installed 28 solar panels which are expected to save the park an estimated 18 tons of CO2 emissions annually. Energy generated from the project, which is being spearheaded by National Grid, will replace more than one-third of the approximately 3.1 million BTUs used for the process of heating water where the Boston Red Sox make their home, RenewableEnergyWorld reports. The maximum daily solar panel thermal energy production will be approximately 1.1 million BTUs, 37 percent of the current load.

Read more at Environmental Leader here.  Go Sox!

Don't Turn Left

I just read an article about UPS and how they now route their delivery trucks so that they only have to turn left 10% of the time. No sitting at a light or fighting against traffic while spewing CO2 into the atmosphere. While this is probably acheived with some serious software developed by very smart developers, it all had to start with a simple idea. It probably sounded pretty funny in some conference room when proposed - "Let's have the trucks just turn right". But UPS is an innovative company and they went with it. This is the idea behind what we are trying to encourage with Viridus. We want to get these simple ideas out there and let them spread like wildfire. We hope that if someone works at a company who would consider "right hand turns only" a dumb idea, that they will post it to Viridus and let the world learn from it and benefit. Now, if I can only get my GPS unit to do the same. Does anyone know someone at Garmin?

Competitor or Collaborator?

Over the past several months, we have spoken with many corporate sustainability professionals (i.e. folks with either "environment" or "sustainability" in their title on their business card) and to a person they have said they personally collaborate with competitors on green issues at work. For example, we spoke with a corporate sustainability engineer at a biotech firm and he related a story about sharing internal ghg inventory spreadsheets with a direct competitor. Similarly, we interviewed a CSO at a large software firm and he mentioned that sustainability was, "the only area we compete with [a large competitor]."

This strikes us as surprising but pragmatic. On the one hand, you might think that companies that compete with each other would want to keep their sustainability programs confidential, but in reality the greater good of helping the environment outweighs what is viewed as a negligible competitive advantage. And much of the perceived value of sustainability initiatives is the press coverage and consumer marketing benefits. You have to look no further than a company's sustainability report to see how open businesses are on this topic. Companies are incredibly detailed and transparent about the initiatives they undertake, the cost of implementing and the expected and actual results. In fact, thousands of companies use standard reports to communicate what they're doing.

The bottom line is that collaborating with other firms, including competitors, is not only good for the environment, it's good for business.