July 28, 2009

• Tasty Ideas for the Smart Economy

Today I had the privilege of delivering a workshop on strategic branding to the Food Innovation Network, a group of food producers who are developing innovative new food products to be launched later this year (there I am on the right in the above photograph taken with members of the group).

Obviously I can’t reveal the products but I can tell you that there are some really inventive and fresh ideas among this group who seem utterly unfazed by the current economic climate and are driven by a genuine passion that left me feeling uplifted and optimistic about Ireland’s future.

As part of the session I deconstructed some leading food brands, all of whom started out as artisan products and grew to become highly successful businesses: Innocent, Green & Blacks and our own Glenisk.

July 21, 2009

• Made By Six

This new site by Made by Six showcases the really nice functional side of flash websites. Too often we are bombarded with mammoth loading times for overworked and over-thought flash websites. Here, I think Made By Six have really succeeded in creating a great website, that showcases their work in a understated fashion.

July 07, 2009

• Sneak Preview of Andrew Winston’s Green Recovery book

This is worth taking 10 minutes to flick through. Professor Andrew Winston is the co-author of Green to Gold and as I receive his monthly Eco-Advantage ezine, I (and a group of his “close” friends) got a complementary preview of two chapters from his new book Green Recovery. The theme is getting lean by going green and the advance chapters contain some astonishingly simple ways that large US corporations and government agencies have saved multiple millions of dollars.

Here are a few: capping speed limits on delivery trucks at 60 mph, virtual meetings (saving BT 230M in one year), cutting back on office printers and printing less (saving Dow an estimated 30M in energy and materials in 5 years), shutting down computers and office equipment (if users of Windows Vista used the power saving tools in the system the US could save the nation’s electricity bill by 500M pa). With all the focus on alternative energy at the moment, we’re in danger of overlooking the business opportunities that are under our noses right now in terms of helping businesses and homes eliminate energy wastage…

July 07, 2009

• Is 2012 going to be the kick-off year for Green?

At a meeting with a client yesterday morning to discuss strategies for accelerating the adoption of a green technology in the US and Europe, the 1st of January 2012 was cited as d-day. This is the date when new legislation will force equipment in this sector to hit a specified energy-rating. 2012 arose again in the “Computing in Business” supplement that came with last weekend’s Sunday Business Post. In an article on virtualisation, Chris Ingle, consulting director at IDC’s systems group, said EU-wide legislation is expected in 2012 that will cause businesses to have to publish their energy consumption. As we speak, Obama is of course also pushing his Climate Change Bill through to the US Senate and this will have huge symbolic resonance in world markets if he can get it past the oil/coal interests represented there.

However for businesses in the cleantech or green space, 2012 is a long time away. How can they create a sense of urgency now to kickstart the adoption of green technologies? The answer might lie in a comment from Tomas O’Leary of Origina in the same article, “Being green is more about looking where the costs are.”

The hard economic benefits of this approach came later in the article, where Hillingdon Borough cited energy savings of 20K pa and Nissan Ireland reduced server energy requirements by 65%. Smart companies will not lead with “green” right now, they will lead with the cost savings, backing the figures up with a solid business case that incorporates the CSR benefits.

SEI is helping ICT hardware suppliers with a green offering by extending its Accelerated Capital Allowance scheme for energy-efficient equipment, but on a bigger level, we all need to start rethinking what green actually means. Currently it’s seen as a CSR “soft story” and this is doing it no favours among seasoned senior management teams who are grappling with an unprecedented financial crisis. Green needs to be firmly repositioned as a the new economy way of doing business - lean, smart and efficient.