HyperQuake

I am one of those people who really likes the idea of eating locally grown fruits and veggies. l seek out restaurants and markets that specialize in them. So, I was really excited to catch an article on a new expression of this, in, of all things, an airline magazine. (I know, if I care this much about transporting foods I really should confine my travel to mule or paddle boat or something, but I don’t.)

Farmers’ markets have long been frequented by chefs as a source for amazing local in-season produce. Now, there are restaurants popping up all over the US that actually encourage patrons to share the best of their own backyards. Foraging is not a new idea, my dogs do this all the time. They scour the back yard for the best sticks and bugs my neighborhood has to offer. But, now restaurants are creating their own foraging culture.

Localvore “Foraging” ranges from chef’s literally exploring the land near their restaurants for useful edible items to sending out harvest calls for crops from home gardens. The resulting daily specials with true “just picked” flavors sound positively delightful.

Tomatoes from community farm Johnson’s Backyard Garden in Austin

Eating local is a great idea however it comes to fruition, but I must admit the idea of bringing something from my garden to be transformed by a food virtuoso into something both imaginative and delectable sounds absolutely dreamy to me.

HyperQuake strategists continue to participate in a 13-week webinar entitled “Sustainability Boot Camp” hosted by Sustainable Life Media. In the third session, William Sarni, CEO of DOMANI, presented his thoughts on the topic “Innovation Opportunities in Response to Today’s Environmental Hot Buttons: Climate Change, Water & Waste.”

In his presentation, Sarni points out that 2009 will be marked as the year when sustainability went mainstream–the year where the old paradigm of abundant materials and limitless energy was openly (and successfully) challenged by environmental and social performance. Large opportunity areas such as Revenue, Risk Management and Reduced Operating Costs expose business opportunities as not simply about compliance.

In a September 2009 exclusive, Newsweek released their first annual Green Score Rankings. In it, a strong correlation between Green performers is made to companies that are successful overall. It summarizes that sixteen out of eighteen companies with high green scores had a 10-15% better stock performance than peers. This information suggests that perhaps voluntary sustainability isn’t really voluntary anymore- both in terms of business success and critic review.

Innovation for sustainability is really no different, then, than other realms of innovation and very similar to HQ’s own definition and approach to innovation. It requires foresight, open collaboration, creativity and discipline. It’s about taking risks, accepting failure and knowing that true innovation is about improvement, not efficiency.

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As emerging markets work to attain the middle class standard of living, it would take 5-6 planet Earths to support them (if they do it the way developed countries have done it).

…scary, huh? Even with recent reports that question the authenticity of global warming data from the mainstream scientific community, we know that the resources we depend on to do business and maintain our standard of living are becoming more scarce, and therefore, more expensive.

“An impeded stream is the one that sings” – Wendell Berry

Gil Friend’s webinar on innovation, the first session in the Sustainability Boot Camp series, was exciting and inspiring as he described the robust opportunities for product and process innovation by adding the constraint of “sustainability” to design. Design, he defined, is the process of innovating in the face of constraints, and adding sustainability as a constraint isn’t about being altruistic, it’s about accounting for the real costs of doing business (accounting for the cost of transportation, waste, supplier resources, etc.).

Traditionally, innovation has been about optimizing either one or two of the attributes of (1) speed, (2) cost and (3) quality of products, services and processes. Conventional thinking has always claimed that we make trade-offs among these three attributes and that it’s impossible to optimize all three at the same time; however, sustainability challenges us to do just that.

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HyperQuake strategists are participating in a 13-week webinar entitled “Sustainability Boot Camp” hosted by Sustainable Life Media. This first session was bonus preview that featured Jennifer Rice, founder and chief strategist of Fruitful Strategy discussing “Key Factors in Building Your Sustainable Brand Strategy.”

10 Strategies for Building a Credible Sustainable Brand:
1. Be proactive
2. Be transparent
3. Know your limits
4. Be relevant
5. Borrow credibility
6. Leverage brand strengths
7. Create a brand
8. Be consistent
9. Educate
10. Engage

Many of the ideas boil down to basic common sense and authenticity, but there were a lot of great brand examples attributed to each of the above factors and quick stats that caught my attention. Namely, only one out of 1,018 brands lived up to its green claims, and 25% of companies have said that they make the efforts purely for the public perception of being sustainable. Only 7% claim that their sustainable efforts are because they care about the environment. No wonder there is such a backlash toward Greenwashing.

Kudos to brands like Patagonia, Timberland, Home Depot and even some surprises like SC Johnson, Walmart and BP who are making efforts toward more credible sustainability. Thankfully, you don’t have to be perfect to make an effort.

As a woodworker hobbyist, I’m always looking for ways to save money on lumber. Domestic hardwoods, particularly large boards like maple, walnut and cherry can run a pretty penny. Being a naturally curious person, I learned about a guy who lives here in town, we can call him George the Sawyer. A sawyer is a person who travels to various locations with a portable saw mill to cut up logs into usable lumber, which is both a great way to get access to a new source of sustainably harvested lumber, and a cool way to expand my woodworking hobby.

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