SW News 23

Innovate to accelerate

Collaboration and partnership have always been buzz words in sustainability. Everyone knows that to achieve sustainability goals we have to work together. No country, company or community can do it on their own. In response to this, we see collaborative sustainability initiatives happening at many different levels – at global level (e.g. the Sustainable Development Goals; the Paris Climate Agreement), at industry level (e.g. the WeMeanBusiness Coalition; the Glasgow Financial Alliance for net zero), and at sectoral level (e.g. the Principles of Responsible Banking, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, the Broadcasting Sustainability Roadmap). There are also broad coalitions like the All Ireland Pollinator Plan that citizens, communities, and organisations can all get involved in.

Collaborative initiatives are very successful at bringing together groups of people and organisations to work towards common goals and to apply common principles or practices in how they do things. However, to really accelerate the pace of change on sustainability - and climate action in particular - we need to marry collaboration with innovation. This is the sweet spot.

Through SW’s work with businesses – particularly large corporates who are advanced on their sustainability journey – we are seeing a growing need and demand for innovative sustainability solutions. These corporates have developed their sustainability strategy, they’ve got their implementation plan or their decarbonisation roadmap down on paper, and they now need to make it happen. They need to deliver on the targets they’ve set. To do this, the systems and solutions they’ve relied on in the past won’t suffice. New approaches – sometimes radically new ones – are required.

This is where sustainability gets exciting and where the opportunity side of it opens up. There is potential opportunity for corporates who are brave enough to try new approaches and invest in sustainable technologies or solutions that could be gamechanging. There is also enormous potential and financial gain to be had by both start-ups and established companies who can bring innovative solutions to the market.

Sustainability has sometimes been described as the biggest business opportunity of the 21^st century. We need to make this true by doing more to promote and accelerate sustainable innovation in Ireland and around the world. At SW are working on a few exciting projects to help play our part. We'll share more in the coming months, so watch this space!

P.S. Wishing all our readers a good break over the summer. SW News is also taking a summer holiday – we’ll be back in September!

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