Transition to sustainability is the biggest project human kind has ever done. Until recently we based everything on an unlimited resources. Now all our processes, machines, everything we do and use must become sustainable. Every company in the world must improve it. Sustainability transition will not stop and it will take decades. Simply, it is one of the biggest forces in society, politics, and business today, and it will remain so for a very long time.
Open innovation must be an integral part of all sustainability because of these 3 reasons:
Transparency
Open innovation – publishing opportunities, challenges, open calls, rewarding, etc – offers credible transparency. It is not enough to simply do a quarterly press release claiming some little thing in a company is a bit more sustainable just to buy few more years of “doing business the good old way”. Customers are smart and they demand more, and open innovation offers unprecedented transparency and trust.
More know-how
Very few companies know how to improve sustainability. Most companies just go to the closest popular solutions without much research. Open innovation would allow them access to a much wider range of solutions, out of which some might be far better. Open innovation opportunities, combined with targeted promotion and a well developed network, can make a company into a sustainability leader.
Working with customers
Sustainability changes can be seen by customers as brutal – they are unilateral, cold, drastic. One of the reasons companies are afraid of implementing bigger sustainability changes is because they do not know how to get their customers to support them. Open innovation can make sustainability transition into a collaborative experience, instead of a top-down negative change.
For sustainability to succeed it must use open innovation for transparency, know-how, and participation. Otherwise, the risk of rejection and lagging is high.
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