A unifying framework for sustainable innovation with Philips and City of Eindhoven

 

Eindhoven, November 1 - During an inspiring lecture in the Einstein Auditorium at the High Tech Campus Eindhoven, Dr Karl-Henrik Robèrt, a Swedish cancer scientist who currently plays an important role in the worldwide sustainability movement, explained about the Natural Step framework for sustainability. This well-attended event was organized by the Municipality of Eindhoven in collaboration with Philips.

“My talk is about purpose and direction. If you don’t have a clue about a direction for sustainability, how can you strategically approach it?” said Dr Robèrt. “We need a unifying framework to explain what sustainability is, which can be used for many purposes: analysis, monitoring your plans, getting people and tools together.”

The growth of value
Dr Robèrt explained that we are currently living with an obsession for growth in size, as for example expressed by countries’ Gross National Product (GNP), but that we have forgotten about the growth of value: “Nature is the best example: growth has been going on for 3.5 billion years, but without any growth in size. We began with the same amount of matter as now in a dispersed mess, 3.5 billion years ago, which has been turned over in smarter and smarter ways during evolution. This proves that you don’t need to grow in size infinitely to increase value. “

Contrary to growth in size, value creation can continue ad infinitum if we learn to decouple value creation from scaling up material streams around the globe. Dr Robèrt: “Today, however, we are seeing the opposite: we are going backwards, back to this dispersed mess – losing more and more forests and species, going back to where we came from, losing more and more value with the same amount of matter.”

 

The four principles of sustainability
To support achieving a more sustainable society, the Natural Step framework is built around four conditions: 1. eliminate your contribution to the progressive buildup of substances extracted from the Earth's crust (for example, heavy metals and fossil fuels); 2. eliminate your contribution to the progressive buildup of chemicals and compounds produced by society (for example, dioxins, PCBs, and DDT); 3. eliminate your contribution to the progressive physical degradation and destruction of nature and natural processes (for example, over harvesting forests and paving over critical wildlife habitat); and 4. eliminate your contribution to conditions that undermine people’s capacity to meet their basic human needs (for example, unsafe working conditions and not enough pay to live on).

 

Step-wise changes in a co-creation process
“With these principles, civilization is saved from the destiny of becoming unsustainable. We can use them as boundary conditions for redesign. So any organization can put its own vision, mission statement, core values, and strategic goals within these boundary conditions, and then ask the right questions to achieve a winning state of mind”, Dr Robèrt added. For any organizational action defined in the line of the sustainability principles, three strategic prioritization questions need to be answered:  is it moving your organization toward or away from your sustainability vision; is this action a flexible platform toward your sustainability vision; and finally, will this action offer an adequate return on investment? “With a ‘yes’ to all three questions, you have found an early, smart step to make”, he said.”It is a participatory, democratic process of co-creation, an informed dialogue, all within the same definition of sustainability. Start making step-wise changes to reach your goals: make the public aware, put together expert panels, understand the challenges ahead, investigate possibilities, and start smart early moves, building on opportunities for cooperation.”

A tough struggle
Achieving a sustainable society will be a tough struggle, but Dr Robèrt is optimistic: “We have to come to grips with this global challenge. If you look at mankind, we are clever, but not without trying to be so. And with the Natural Step framework, we are helping people who would like to take action. Eindhoven is in a phenomenal position to win this game and become a role model for the region.”