The 7 Principles of Sustainable Innovation

Driven by the increasing global challenges our society is dealing with daily, a new paradigm has emerged in the design world - one that seeks to transform entire systems and the organisations that operate within them towards sustainability. From the COVID-19 pandemic to climate change to the gig economy, our eyes are wide open to the fact that if businesses and organisations are not thinking long term, we will never be able to achieve big collective goals like hitting our emission reduction targets or building an economy that doesn’t incentivize exploitation, but rather lends dignity to workers, and nurtures communities. This shift has seen a broadening of the design discipline’s ambition and perspective as it moves in the direction of designing interactions between diverse organisations, communities, people, and natural environments. But it also reflects a new understanding of just how consequential the decisions made during the design phase are. So what does this mean for design and innovation teams? And for businesses? How can we move from an extractive to a regenerative paradigm? Keeping the bigger picture in mind needn’t be a distant, abstract concept. In fact it’s fundamentally a matter of adopting these seven principles that we believe are necessary to make Sustainable Innovation a reality.