Create meaningful sustainable development results through innovation

There has been significant progress over the past two decades in Silicon Valley, resulting in innovation for even the most mundane needs. Yet we have failed to address some of the great challenges we face around the world. We haven’t been able to drive change and track progress nearly as quickly.

Setting the Sustainable Development Goals in 2017 was an important step. But as we all know, six years have passed and we are not on the right track. We fail to achieve many of the goals. Experts are talking about a two to three trillion dollar annual shortfall in the funding needed to run the sustainable development agenda, and more funding is certainly needed. But an element we don’t focus enough on is the quality of solutions that can create more effective results for the investments made. We will not fill the gap with money, but with innovation. The goal should not be to implement as much as possible, but rather to learn as quickly as possible. Companies committed to identifying and scaling sustainability solutions can do so by applying four key innovation principles:

1. Think big

In the sustainability sector, teams tend to think in terms of constraints. Nonprofit leaders will discuss how much budget is available, the number of volunteers supporting a program, and a time frame. They would ask, what can we do with this? Over the past five years of consulting companies, I’ve found that social entrepreneurs and sustainability teams think similarly. To deliver meaningful social and environmental innovation, companies must shift their planning approaches from constraint-based to needs-based planning. Instead, the discussion could be what can we do to move the needle on the issue and how can we scale to make a difference in the depth of impact that will make an even bigger difference?

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2. Start small

Although it may seem counterintuitive, it’s important to think big but also start small.

Too often we think too small and start too big. For example, nonprofits receive a grant, start a program, and are held accountable to start achieving results. Therefore, the pressure of delivery does not give the organization much time to experiment and find the best solutions. A key advantage of starting small is that you can experiment quickly, take more risks and learn cheaply. When we plan for impact, we will most likely end up with extensive planning, meetings and research. During this period, we will incur significant risk and expend significant amounts of time and money. Instead, we could look ahead to how to overcome the risks. Without spending so much time on detailed planning, we would go into the field and test different variations of our strategies for each intervention.

Based on the scientific method, the faster you can move through the innovation cycle, the faster you will innovate. Therefore, the focus should be on iteration speed. Not doing things perfectly. A necessary shift at this point is: from striving for perfection to how quickly we can move through this cycle.

3. Including over-giving

Over the past 30 years, we have built slow but steady initiatives on some of the 17 goals, including access to clean water, electricity and sanitation. During my time working in the field of sustainable development, I witnessed the inadequacy of corporate social responsibility, philanthropy and social business to address the root cause of major development challenges such as poverty. These approaches often create aid dependency among communities and reinforce patronizing narratives. For example, I’ve heard that it’s hard to do better than helping poor people reach the bare minimum of decent living conditions because they live in remote areas, so it’s hard to get access to them. This remains true if we think of sustainable development as giving rather than including. Inclusive business models offer a solution that engages the poor as members of the formal economy. This enables people to access markets, goods, services and job opportunities, while providing businesses with new consumer markets and supplier bases.

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4. Partner up

In most cases, companies will not have the know-how to design and deliver an effective social impact strategy. This is especially true for small and medium-sized enterprises, but also for large companies and large corporations.

There is an often overlooked opportunity to work hand-in-hand with local, specialist organizations focused on impact, including non-profits and social enterprises. Finding the right partner to guide, advise or execute a company’s social impact programs will enable two outcomes:

• Reporting Impact: Relying on the expertise of a nonprofit or social enterprise allows companies to support communities in effective ways. Impact partners must be able to demonstrate the extent of impact made along the way using quarterly and annual impact reports.
• Positive association: There is nothing in business today that delivers so many economic and social benefits, on so many levels, to so many stakeholders, as a strategic partnership with an organization that makes an impact. Unless you run a large company with the necessary skills and resources to deliver an impact-oriented program to the degree of expertise of a specialized nonprofit organization; establishing partnerships with nonprofits is your best bet.

These principles are a good start to strengthen the company’s social impact and its contribution to the sustainable development agenda. Other questions to think about are: how exactly will you communicate your company’s impact to your customers? How will you connect your company’s mission and vision to your social impact goals? Will it be based on a storytelling strategy? How will you make sure your outreach efforts resonate with different groups in your audience?

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