THINK IT – BUILD IT – SCALE IT
Our Why
If you have been working in sustainability for any amount of time you will have been on the wrong side of a project that didn’t live up to expectations or didn’t deliver the positive impacts you were hoping for. Its frustrating when the business case is so compelling but you struggle to engage colleagues or senior management.
As it turns out you are not alone with a study by Bain & Company revealing that 98 percent of sustainability programs fail and 81 percent settle for a dilution of value or mediocre results. The survey of 300 companies including big names like Coca-Cola, Nestle, and Novozymes cited lack of investment or resources, competing priorities, culture change challenges, and organisational obstacles as key barriers to their sustainability programs but if we think of our sustainability programs as a product or service, what this study reveals is a failure to achieve product market fit.
In sustainability we are trying to create new scalable products or services that are often innovative or disruptive in an environment of extreme uncertainty. Therefore, the traditional business planning processes we are all taught which involve some variation of defining the business case, creating a plan, and executing that plan are simply not fit for purpose because these processes have been developed for existing known products with existing customers.
We believe that sustainability practitioners need to think differently and be more entrepreneurial. We believe that sustainability professionals need to think more like a startup and build scalable business models to deliver positive environmental and social impacts.
To put this belief into practice, we work with Entrepreneurs, Business and Government to design, develop, and implement environmental and social initiatives using lean startup and agile methods to provide a better return on everyone’s investment and a positive impact on our community and planet.
Our What
We offer a program to establish your own startup ecosystem to scale your environmental and social impacts which we call the Sustainability Launchpad.
Existing companies are in the business of executing business models whilst startups, like sustainability teams, are in the business of discovering business models. This distinction is at the heart of the Sustainability Launchpad method. The Sustainability Launchpad method is based on three Silicon Valley concepts; the Business Model Canvas, the Lean Startup method, and Agile Management.
First, rather that write a detailed business plan based on what amounts to a series of best guesses, Sustainability Launchpad practitioners accept that all they have are a series of untested hypotheses. These hypotheses are organised using a tool called the business model canvas which describes the eleven basic building blocks of a sustainable business model – in other words how your solution delivers value for you and your customers.
Second, Sustainability Launchpad practitioners then test these assumptions by soliciting customer feedback to test their hypotheses. They do this by talking to customers about all aspects of the business model with an emphasis on speed within a build, measure, and learn cycle. The feedback is used to adjust the assumptions and then repeat the cycle with minor adjustments to the offering (iterations) or changes in direction (pivots) where the idea is simply not working. In some cases this phase also involves building a minimum viable product (MVP) to allow customers to provide feedback.
Third, the Sustainability Launchpad process uses agile development which is a methodology derived from the software industry. Agile development is based on developing a solution iteratively and in small measurable features with constant customer testing and feedback – a bit like building a home one brick at a time.