As sustainability professionals we are all trying to deliver amazing social and environmental outcomes but we are always competing for more time and more resources with other business initiatives. At the same time we are trying to implement new innovative ideas and we sometimes do not really know if they will work which makes it all the more difficult to convince colleagues and clients that this is a good idea.
Heres the thing – startup companies deal with these dilemmas on a daily basis yet many of them go on to disrupt and transform entire industries. In my last post I discussed a why sustainability professionals need to think like a start-up in order get real change happening and prove the value of sustainability in your company.
The first thing we advise our clients who want to unlock sustainability as an engine for growth in their organisation is to think like a scientist. Do you remember the scientific method from high school chemistry? Ask a research question, design a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, learn, iterate the hypothesis, repeat.
We use this method at Blue Tribe as the first step in helping our clients to establish a sustainability startup mindset to design quickly, iterate swiftly, get to market before the competition and deliver sustainability outcomes.
Step 1 – Ask a question
In 2003, when 20 something Fred Mazzella was trying to get home for Christmas in the French countryside he was stuck as he had no car and the trains were full. After begging his sister to pick him up he noticed that although the trains were full, the cars surrounding him on the freeway were full of empty seats and he was astounded by the huge number of people driving alone. So he asked the question, “what if all of those empty seats could become a new travel network?”.
Step 2 – Design a Hypothesis
The next step is to design a hypothesis that questions a key assumption underpinning your idea. For Fred the hypothesis was – would people really want to share a ride with a stranger and be willing to pay for it and would drivers want to fill the empty seats in their car?
Step 3 – Test the Hypothesis
To test his idea Fred built a simple online platform that was really like a classifieds site that connected drivers with spare seats to people looking for a ride and allowed them to negotiate the price which he launched in 2004.
Step 4 – Learn
Based on the learnings from this first simple test Frank and his now co-founder Francis Nappez official launched their business in France in September 2006 with a mobile version in 2007 just before a major train strike in October 2007 which saw them being on the TV and radio, and the platform was featured in over 500 newspaper articles. By 2008 the new venture had over 100 thousand users and was growing daily.
Step 5 – Iterate the Hypothesis
The team, which now include another co-founder Nicolas Brusson, iterated their core hypothesis about the ride sharing service from testing B2B business models to help companies implement ride sharing services on their company intranets through to B2C models with monthly fees and premium memberships. They continue to iterate to this day.
Step 6 – Repeat
Today, BlaBlaCar, the company founded on the hypothesis that all of those empty seats in cars travelling to various destinations could become a new travel network, has over 35 million members across 22 countries and continues to connect people looking to travel long distances with drivers going the same way. BlaBlacar still operate by the mantra “think it, build it, use it” and continue to repeat the ask, design, test, learn and iterate startup process.
Over the past decade, the trio took this simple idea and built it into the world’s leading carpooling platform, connecting millions of people going the same way and it all started by asking a simple question.
What questions could you ask about your organisation that could transform its sustainability performance?
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