Green Innovation Begins With Each Of Us

Green innovation is here to stay.  It is a growing focus of consumer advocacy, it is a cornerstone of the new administration’s innovation strategy and it makes increasing sense for a variety of businesses.

While much attention is being paid to high tech frontiers such as non-polluting energy sources and smart power grids, I believe the “final frontier” is each of us.  What I mean is that our behavior, and our ability to learn in order to change it, is fundamental to our sustainable future.  No amount of high tech innovation on the supply side can transform the energy equation if the demand side that is made up of millions of behavioral “moments of truth” every day does not transform as radically. 

I raise this point based on what I learned in one of my previous careers - medicine.  When I was in medical school in the late 70’s, expenditures on health care hovered around 10%. And that seemed like an unsustainable rate of expenditure and growth. Now we are tracking at 17% of GDP, and on course to rise to 20% by the year 2017. 

The problem was not innovation on the supply side.  Scientific advances coupled with entrepreneurial business motives led to ever more technologically inventive (and expensive) curative technologies.  However, the focus on more effective technology has trumped the demand side of investing in healthy behaviors; our health care costs are burdened by simple, but highly costly, human challenges.  For example, I quickly learned as a young physician-in-training that one of my most significant challenges was compliance.  Simply put, a large percentage of patients didn’t take their medications properly.  No medications, no cure.  Other challenges had to do with the lack of methods (and time) to teach patients so they could become active collaborators in maintaining their health.

Health care has begun to confront what the green movement must, namely that designing for human beings – taking into account their needs and the nuances of their behavior - is critical to successful outcomes.  And this is hard (as designers know) because the most important human needs and motivations are often tacit, that is they are often teased out only by someone with the observational skills of an ethnographer able make inferences about what is needed.  The knowledge that counts often does not emerge through focus groups, questionnaires or the typical methods of marketers.  So, user centered design, design driven by the real-world needs and motivations of users is key.

This line of discussion leads to interesting questions.  What is a green lifestyle?  What is a green living environment?  What is a green workspace?  How do we piece together the hundreds of energy and sustainability related decisions we make each day, often in a completely unconscious manner, into a new kind of sustainable lifestyle?  How does that lifestyle vary in terms of culture and social variables?   How do we encourage people towards a sustainable lifestyle by enabling them to learn about the consequences of their choices?  Supply chain experts are dreaming of the day when we can scan a barcode on a product in a supermarket to find out the provenance of a chicken or a peach – whether grown sustainability, in what location and processed by whom, etc. The same logic could apply to our energy behavior – the carbon footprint of a particular choice, the energy source, the tradeoffs, etc.

User experience will be key to making the sustainable lifestyle a reality.  My desk is piled with business plans from “energy dashboard” ventures that are trying to give average citizens a sense of the consequences of their decisions.  At present, our decisions are made in a vacuum – we need to provide them with context, and the kind of context available at our fingertips.  We need to enable everyone to be an expert and push knowledge down to the lowest and most immediate level of use.  Imagine the metaphor of citizen as sustainability professional and think about how it might be realized.

Design is the “secret sauce” to a sustainable lifestyle because the final frontier is the intractability of human behavior.  I remember working at a local VA hospital as a medical student and seeing patients who had had radical throat surgery for cancer smoke their (unfiltered) cigarettes through a hole in their tracheotomy tubes.  Most cardiac patients can’t change their behavior even when they know that is the only thing that will prolong their life.  We don’t change even when we know it will be good for us and only education, user insight and smart design will make the difference. 

This is a core challenge we are up against and why I say that green innovation ultimately must begin with – and in - each one of us.

John Kao
Chairman, Institute for Large Scale Innovation