Increasing the ROI on Innovation Investments: Sustainability-Driven Innovation

Are you looking to maximize the ROI on your innovation investments?  SingingDog co-founder and Top Dog, Phil Metz, has teamed with Peter Moore, President of Wild Oak Enterprises, to deliver this.  How?  By integrating Metz’s Sustainability-Driven Innovation techniques with Moore’s powerful and proven Offer Power framework for delivering innovation results.

Metz’s research has shown that sustainability – far from being a “cost” and barrier to innovation – can be a powerful lever for revenue growth and profit.  A few examples:

• Interface’s biomimicry-based “Entropy” carpet tile product line has grown to represent over 40% of sales, and is widely emulated by competitors.  In Operations, Interface’s Mission Zero® recycling program targeting zero environmental impact by 2020 has been a major force in increasing sustainability – and reducing operational cost.

• Method Products views sustainability as a business opportunity.  The company’s products, such as its 8X concentrated laundry detergent and phosphate-free automatic dishwasher detergent, have enabled Method to achieve high visibility and revenue growth – while competitors scramble to catch up.  And Method has done this in the slow-growth home cleaning products market dominated by global giants such as Procter & Gamble and Unilever

• MBA Polymers recycles plastics from complex waste streams to deliver, “drop-in replacement” polymer feedstocks that require less than 20% of the energy needed to produce virgin feedstocks from petrochemicals.  As reported in a recent SingingDog blog post, MBA feedstocks have garnered major contracts with Electrolux and other global leaders.

Why does this work?  Not by accident!  Each of these companies has attained its business success by embracing sustainability as a “core operating principle” and “business mindset” to drive innovation.  This conceptual shift alters every innovation action across each enterprise:

• What products should we develop?  What technical competencies do we need?

• How can we improve the customer experience with these products to maximize ROI on our innovation investments?

• What techniques should we use to develop these products and roll them out?

• How should we operate to reduce cost and increase efficiency?

But how can you roll this out in practice to maximize ROI on the innovation investments at your company?  Enter Moore’s powerful Offer Power framework comprising three “playbooks” for delivering results.

1. Differentiation:  Have we created a truly unmatchable offer?
2. Neutralization:  Have we gotten to good enough fast enough?
3. Optimization:  Have we reclaimed unproductive resources and deployed them against differentiation or neutralization opportunities?

Understanding how to maximize the ROI on a portfolio of innovation investments is an exercise in staking out the three distinct offer power positions above that can help fuel your company’s future performance, specifically above-market growth rates with above-market risk-adjusted returns.  What makes this decision-making process challenging is that it is essential to develop three separate and distinct innovation work streams and project teams in order to maximize the benefits of each one. By using the Offer Power framework and tools, we are able to help our clients overcome these challenges and deliver the full ROI potential from all three.

Want to try it out?  Contact us to learn more or to schedule a half-day Chalk Talk or one-day Facilitated Custom Workshop.