In the first piece of this three-part series, I proposed areas of action that a business can focus on to kickstart its decarbonisation journey. However, if you can’t act because you haven’t found the perfect solutions to help your business “go green”, it may be time to switch from browsing to building mode.
First, stop waiting for the perfect find to roll around. It likely doesn’t exist, so don’t let “perfect” be the enemy of “good enough”. Expand your search criteria and get creative in the face of scarcity.
Are there no good options, or have you just not found them? So many tech solutions exist in the market today. Still, they may be marketed for a different industry, be in another geographical region, or have terrible SEO rendering them tough to find.
If in doubt, ask an expert who understands the space, and often solutions will appear. When I ran an open innovation programme to decarbonise the shipping industry, we found exciting solutions in other sectors that could solve marine challenges but hadn’t even considered maritime as a target client base – now they have new product lines and investors because we showed them the potential use-case for shipping.
At SecondMuse, our team running The Incubation Network finds hidden-gem solutions to the plastic pollution problem in every Southeast Asian market we work in because we engage communities at the grassroots level, engage entrepreneur support organisations as partners, and understand that alone we don’t have the answers, but collectively we can see farther.
A hands-on approach for bottom-up solutions
If, even after broadening your horizons, the solutions you find still come up short, consider engaging the ones who come close and help them get over the line.
Also Read: How carbon in the metaverse can help solve the real-world climate crisis
At times, the technology is sound, but the business model doesn’t fit your needs, or there is some other (completely valid) barrier to adoption. We as a society have to invest in understanding and overcoming these adoption gaps just as much as we invest in developing new innovations and technology.
Regular businesses can play a huge role in bridging these gaps by becoming customers and partners of the best solutions and engaging with or advising the less ideal ones to make them more business-friendly.
Think of how powerful (and useful) it can be to give these climate solutions specific feedback, suggest other possibilities, and even brainstorm better ways forward. Simply saying “no” without any of these other steps doesn’t serve anyone: you still don’t have your solution, and the ones you’ve spent time finding + vetting have no clue how to get better.
Where are the climate solution gaps?
Having reviewed hundreds of startups and worked with close to a dozen corporations to craft partnerships that lower their carbon footprint, I have seen specific friction points come up again and again.
Yet they aren’t entirely impossible, so here are some common gaps I’ve seen and ideas for working through them:
Cost
The clean green solution is often more expensive than the status quo, a concept Bill Gates calls the green premium. How do you bring that down? It depends on what is driving the costs, but unless the problem is the technology (too early = unreliable or too expensive), there is often a way around it.
If it’s the cost-per-unit, can you work with customers to produce in volumes they can afford or find like-minded businesses to join their adoption journey to reduce costs for all?
Also Read: How the ‘Paris agreement’ for plastic is accelerating climate justice in SEA
If it’s a CAPEX issue, could switching to a subscription model, getting a supplier with friendlier payment terms, or finding a financial partner that enables instalments/payment plans to help make this more affordable to adopt?
Convenience
Modern life has been optimised for making everything ready to use, always available, and easy to dispose of; it’s incredibly wasteful but straightforward, so more environmentally friendly options (e.g. reuse/refill models instead of single-use) can feel like too much effort by comparison.
How do you make it easy for businesses or consumers to adopt? Anything that reduces the steps required is reasonable.
In software, you see this with interoperability (instead of forcing customers to adopt new processes or dashboards, ingest the data they have as is and connect everything with APIs); with physical products or consumer choices, consider automatically latching the new desired behaviour onto an existing built-in habit/norm, changing the default choice to the one you want (so they need to opt-out instead of opting-in), or putting a small cost to the undesired behaviour (people take fewer plastic bags when they see they’re being charged 10 cents for one).
Context
Sometimes, engineers create technically marvellous products but are disconnected from the realities of operation. If you see a solution that technically solves the problem but doesn’t fit your commercial or operational models, it provides the context required to achieve a better design.
Many times, the founders you’ll work with are open to adjusting if they can see that working with you opens up a larger opportunity to work with many others in the same sector.
Final thoughts
These are just some of the gaps you’ll find in the market, and even though you work to address them, you may still find yourself falling short of sustainability targets. The climate crisis is one of great complexity: ultimately, we don’t just need better solutions; we need better systems.
In the final part of this three-piece series, I’ll explore how we can take bigger-picture climate action that transcends these steps at the individual or entrepreneurial level.
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