Companies
Starbucks

Scaling innovation

Burgess COMMENTARY
Peter Burgess 7 hours ago

I could not agree more ... scale is important, but also what we scale. While many corporations including Starbucks are talking a lot about various aspects of sustainability, the underlying business model remains dominated by the idea that growth is good. I argue that many poor economies need economic growth and people will benefit from it ... but rich economies should be looking at better performance where less is more. The per capita global foot print of people in rich countries has exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet's ecosystem by several times and this absolutely has to change. The business model where more growth equals more profit equals happy investors guarantees a socio-enviro-economic system crash of cataclysmic scale within the next couple of generations. This is irresponsible. We can do better, and we have to do better. I also argue that we will do better with better metrics where impact on society and impact of the environment are accounted for as rigorously as we account for money and profit!

Peter Burgess http://www.truevaluemetrics.org True Value Accounting
Peter Burgess

Starbucks on scaling sustainability innovation

Jim Hanna, who directs sustainability and environmental impact at Starbucks, challenged GreenBiz Forum attendees to figure out how to scale up and go all out on the giant coffee company's sustainability efforts because 'frankly, without this thing called scale, we're not gonna do it.' The problem of a warming earth is just that big.

The big ideas he suggested are: to plug into the innovation pipeline at your company to scale good ideas; to be humble enough to let others lead — even competing companies — if they have a workable solution; and to galvanize yet other companies who are not yet thinking about sustainability.

The biggest challenge, he said, 'is how do we move from invention to innovation because without scale, innovation doesn't exist.'