Green Innovation – Growing a Green Business – How to Find the Money
Green Innovation can be incremental, an effort to embed environmental attributes in existing products, services, or business practices. It can also be radical, developing entirely new markets based on being completely green.
Either way, the process to find the opportunity and understand how to capitalize on it is the same. Start by understanding the market, look for unmet needs or emerging trends, identify solutions for problems engendered in either, test them in market, and refine/enhance them until ready for rollout.
The first step is to understand the market. If your innovation is incremental, you can rely on tried and true market research methods. However, if your intent is to be radical, the process itself must be innovative. Traditional inputs plus traditional methods yields incremental results. Creative inputs plus cutting-edge methods yields transformative opportunities.
Examples of creative inputs include: conducting ethnography studies in markets where your product or service is utilized very differently, and looking at different industries and how they address analogous issues.
Cutting-edge insights techniques are those which get at root psychological issues, needs, and cognition. Thus, look to state of the art cognitive and behavioral psychological research techniques and apply them in business. Be careful who you employ to conduct the research to ensure the techniques are executed properly and the findings are valid.
Once you have insight on unmet needs and emerging trends in your field of discovery, you are ready to define problem statements around which you will conduct creative problem-solving exercises (commonly known as ideation).
Here too, traditional methods yield incremental results. Approach this with the goal of generating lists of ideas and you will have lots of marginal ideas. On the other hand, approach this as a visualization exercise with the goal of producing finished concepts and you are more likely to achieve a breakthrough.
Either way, concepts must be tested for appeal, understanding, and relevance. Additionally, concept attributes will be evaluated and data gathered for understanding the target market. The data is both quantitative, such as overall appeal, and qualitative, including the comments the test audience makes about concept.
Ideally, you will then offer the concept as a live product, service, or hybrid on a limited scale, i.e., a beta test or prototype. The interaction employees and customers have with a live prototype is invaluable. There are always unintended benefits and consequences.
Also use the prototype to engage your customers in the innovation process by providing forums or channels for them to give you insight on their experience. Profile the prototype customers and segment their behavior with the product or service to more fully understand where the larger-scale opportunity lies.
With all the learning you gain throughout the process, you are well positioned to succeed with your green innovation objectives. Additionally, you can use this process to innovate not just with customers, but also with employees and suppliers to green-up your business practices and supply chain.
Green innovation can be successful in either adding green attributes to existing products or services, or developing revolutionary new green offers. Either way, there is green in green.
By: Glennon Franklin
About the Author:
Glennon Franklin is a Principal at Green Sight LLC, which provides actionable advice on green marketing strategy, innovation, and employee engagement in sustainable business practices. http://www.greensightllc.com.
