Whole System Innovation: the Blog

I have long awaited the day when business and technology would begin to use principles of sustainability as the foundation for how we create and pay for our products and services. Well, the future has arrived with the concept of triple bottom line and socially responsible investing, which holds a whole new framework for innovation to emerge.

If you like to watch your money AND the planet grow green take a look below. Thank you Cliff for all of your years of persevering with GreenMoney Journal. You have helped make a once future idea (green investing) become a growing present day activity.

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In GreenMoney Journal’s special 15th Anniversary issue (Summer 2007) they are looking ahead at the next fifteen years through the eyes of several visionary leaders who have shaped today’s green investing and business world.

GreenMoney forecasts offer a greener future, to be sure. Be prepared to see a “green print” for a more sustainable world in which both challenge and opportunity abound. If fact, the next 15 years will be more critical then the last as we shift our attention from global war to global warming.

How will we evolve? Petroleum wars will end as people more fully realize the human and environmental costs associated with the finite commodity. The evolution will continue as the clean green energy revolution builds momentum. Issues of political justices and socio-economic justice will become even more closely tied. Higher environmental standards, clear market incentives and the laws of supply and demand will drive the culture of sustainable innovation.

Patriotism will be demonstrated not by SUV bumper stickers, but by responsible ecological behavior. As New York Times columnist Tom Friedman says, “Green is the new Red, White, and Blue.”

But this rapidly approaching future for our country is also global. Internationally, corporate accountability will include Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors as corporate management come to the inescapable conclusion that any financial analysis that excludes these factors cannot safely predict a company’s long-term profitability. According to several of our writers, the next 15 years will see the full integration of ESG into financial analysis and corporate decisions to reflect a triple bottom line.

As more individuals understand that their shopping and investing choices have impacts, they will want to make those impacts positive and sustainable. How will that happen? GreenMoney will continue to provide the answers.

In the special Summer issue: Amy Domini of Domini Social Investments shows us how the “culture of capitalism” will be fundamentally transformed; Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm outlines a dynamic future from food to technology, examining the challenges and opportunities of climate change; our favorite futurist Hazel Henderson spells out future global trends and counter trends; Spencer Beebe of Ecotrust keeps it green with an environmental discussion on advantages of Bioregions; and Joe Keefe of Pax World Funds shows us the road from Socially Responsible Investing to ESG and sustainable investing.

And if you want to get the 32-page print version (with exclusive features like the socially responsible mutual fund performance chart) of the special 15th Anniversary Summer ‘Visionaries’ issue for the Special Anniversary Rate of just $15 ( discounted from $50 ), go to the GreenMoney Journal via our website at- www.greenmoney.com . See details below.

You can also find an extensive set of 'exclusively online' articles on our web site by sustainability leaders, including Joan Bavaria of Trillium Asset Mgmt, Barbara Krumsiek of Calvert, Woody Tasch of Investors Circle, Allan Savory of Holistic Mgmt. Intl., Jean Pogge of ShoreBank, author and vegetarian chef Deborah Madison, as well as Tessa Tennant and many others.

SUBSCRIPTION Information
Online at- www.Greenmoney.com
US - $15 a year, Canada - $20 a year, International - $25 a year
Cliff Feigenbaum, Founder and Managing Editor,
GreenMoney Journal and greenmoney.com
Co-author, “Investing with Your Values” with Hal Brill and Jack Brill
Subscriptions - (800) 849-8751
Email - cliffgmj@gmail.com

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Here is a book that provides an excellent framework for extracting unusual forms of innovation within your company. Below I have posted the book's content, which includes insights on the future of business and checklists for tranforming your company's operations into a sustainable enterprise.

'Ecomanagement: The Elmwood Guide to Ecological Auditing and Sustainable Business'

Written by Ernest Callenbach, Lenore Goldman, Fritjof Capra, and Rudiger Lutz, and Sandra Marburg.

You can purchase the book at Amazon

THEORY AND PRACTICE OF ECOMANAGEMENT

How to plan a full ecological audit based on business, personnel, organizational, human, and psychological considrerations. Checklists dealing with questions of implementation with suggestions on how to set priorities.

CHECKLIST GUIDE FOR THE ECOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATION OF BUSINESS

ENERGY AND MATERIALS: INFLOWS
CHECKLIST #1 ENERGY
CHECKLIST #2 MATERIALS

DESIGN, PROCESSING, AND MANUFACTURING OPERATIONS
CHECKLIST #3: PRODUCT DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT
CHECKLIST #4 MANUFACTURING AND PRODUCTION
CHECKLIST #5 RECYCLING

SALES/ MARKETING, VVASTE, AND EMISSION OUTFLOWS
CHECKLIST #6 MARKETING AND SALES
CHECKLIST #7 WASTES AND EMISSIONS

FINANCIAL, HUMAN RESOURCE, AND OTHER SUPPORT STRUCTURES
CHECKLIST #8 FINANCE
CHECKLIST #9 INVESTMENTS
CHECKLIST # 1 0 THE WORKPLACE
CHECKLIST #11 TRANSPORTATION
CHECKLIST # 1 2 THE PHYSICAL PLANT AND ITS ENVIRONS
CHECKLIST# 1 3 INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS RELATIONS

Read on for detailed descriptions for each chapter ...

Continue reading "Innovation Generated Through Ecological Management" »

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by Vic Desotelle, inKNOWvate

inKNOWvate's primary focus is on creating deep systemic innovation. To do this, inKNOWvate is using the internationally recognized 'triple bottom line' model in a very different way than most. (For example, ‘economy’ does not directly correlate to finance or money. However, the interdependencies between economy, ecology, and equity does correlate to a broader monetary comprehension and use.) Additionally, inKNOWvate uses a set of other descriptive models with the goal of initiating and creating new forms of wholistic innovation. Although important, sustainability itself is not the objective; but rather creating integrated 'wholesystem' innovation. Then establish a relationship with that innovation to a symbol of exchange (currency or money) that reflects triple bottom line value.

Here’s some innovation-currency related concepts to consider:
Defining Whole System Innovation
Six Point Organizing Architecture

Also refer to inKNOWvate's:
Triple Bottom Line Management Framework
Seventeen Domains of Community Design and Development
Regenerative Commerce

Vic Desotelle
Founding Principal
inKNOWvate

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by Vic Desotelle, inKNOWvate

Using this image: Six Point Organizing Architecture, start by defining your company as a ‘learning organization’ that allows ongoing, multifaceted innovation to emerge throughout the organization. Then, initiate stakeholder conversations around personal values, which resides at the organization’s nucleus or core. Allow those values to intertwine and, like rippling waters from rocks being thrown into a pool, move out from each one’s center (known as a ‘centrix, meaning multiple centers) toward the outer boundary of the company. Here, values become recognized as something beyond individual, but instead collective. Collisions across the inner tri-cellular concepts of ecology, economy, and equity (triple bottom line) create the necessary interference patterns for deep learning to occur. Values begin to adjust and align. Then, at the company’s perimeter, each person’s independent values merge into a collaborative agreement known as the ‘values proposition’: an agreement of what they ‘believe’ they can offer to others. At this stage, wise decision-making can begin (but not before). Decision-making beyond self-centered organizational perspectives occur at the interface (or boundary) between the company itself and its external environment of ‘others’. Decisions become based in values beyond self once again, only this time it is at the level of organizations, not individuals. These valued decisions that are beyond the boundaries of the company now have monetary association, i.e. The proposition becomes important enough to use underlying metaphors of ‘currency’ that represent agreed upon forms of exchange. This collective representation of value (called a ‘dollar’, etc) can be accessed, not just a metaphor for exchange, but as a ‘resource’ just like the materials needed to build the product. Financial investments of group and individual assets into the project or product now has triple bottom line value (a dollar sign with 3 lines through it). Strategically, a process and a managing organizational system can created that manages the total (cyclic) cost accountability of the product or service - including design, production, distribution, and regeneration.

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by Vic Desotelle, inKNOWvate

In the triple bottom line definition, money is a representation of a balanced exchange of goods and services between people or organizations - accounting for the interdependent aspects of their [ecology, economy, equity], with conscious [learning, values, and decisions] being the outcomes for realizing a deeper connection via the exchanges between self and other. The triple bottom line symbol is a dollar sign with 3 lines through it.

Refer to pdf: Triple Bottom Line Management Framework

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