The challenge
Our approach
Net zero product discovery
In this whitepaper we examine the potential rewards of sustainable yet multidimensional business growth and reveal why whole system mapping is a prerequisite for driving essential system-level – not just product-level – innovation.
Adapting business for sustainability
Building, evaluating and transforming
Transforming behaviour to align with the imperatives of sustainability, net zero emissions and the circular economy offers the opportunity to create a truly world-leading business. But it demands deep quantitative analysis of the entire lifecycle of business inputs and outputs – well beyond the typical boundaries of a product or service sale. Only detailed examination of the whole system provides the insight needed to determine where the gains can be made.
Evaluating opportunities in the context of the triple bottom line – people, planet and profit – allows all key stakeholders to be considered. And ensures that business requirements are built into innovation that meets identified sustainability goals.
Driving net zero – is agritech ready to capture carbon?
How modern techniques – proven in other industries – can be combined with modern data science to measure overall carbon uptake in an economically viable way.
Unlocking sustainability innovation for major Japanese brands
Addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals is one of the most important but challenging tasks businesses face today. However, the challenge also provides opportunity and can help to define goals that can be targeted with radical innovation. A number of our key Japanese friends recognised this - and joined our unique Innovation Catalyst Programme (ICP) to transform such goals into inspiring and tangible outputs.
Technology can be part of the solution
Circular economy
Driving sustainable practices
The move from linear economies of ‘make, use, dispose’ to a circular economy which aims to extend the longevity of resources in use and at end of life, to extract and regenerate for reuse, is an urgent priority. The move requires radical shifts in all elements of business, from underlying principles and approaches within markets to fundamentally rethinking product development and design.
The principles of circular economy can be applied more widely than traditional product development cycles and can structure the approach to broader opportunities to drive sustainable practices in businesses.
From emissions to sequestration, how does your product’s carbon modelling shape up?
Over a series of discussions with clients on sustainability we’ve been building a quick and accessible modelling tool to model the carbon cost implications of typical high-volume products across a variety of markets.
Extracting value from e-waste
Year-on-year we’re producing more and more waste electronics – e-waste. Recovering the valuable materials embedded inside it will become significantly more important. At present, this is a highly manual process.
Rewriting our energy society
Understanding and optimising power generation and use
Adapting society to a low and ultimately zero carbon economy will require a fundamental rewriting of most of our existing energy sources.
From power generation and transport to consumption and all the steps in between, technology will be required to understand and optimise power generation and use.
An increasingly distributed and variable energy generation and storage network will require adaptive and active management, moving us away from the centralised peak demand led ideology of energy production and distribution to localised adaptive networks which match supply and demand at a more granular level.
Incorporating broader approaches to methods of energy generation and storage increases the complexity but also resilience in our energy society.
Digital services innovation to transform building performance
This sustainability story highlights how a strong client partnership can propel vital digital services innovation against a backdrop of pressing global concern – in this case CO2 emissions.
Working closely with built-environment cleantech specialists Redbarn Group, we developed a breakthrough digital service that offers a viable thermal test for every commercially developed property.
How to spur climate change in 2021 while juggling economic recovery from COVID-19
The Middle East is key to effecting the energy transition of the 21st century. Few regions of the world have such a reliance on the businesses that must make the biggest changes to their operations. Entire economies must be pivoted away from petrochemicals, whilst still enabling living standards to rise. Achieving a safe and just transition affects us all.
Exploring new ways of delivering home energy
With climate change presenting an existential threat to life on earth, humanity must confront the emergency with ingenuity. This imperative helped inspire our contribution to the development of a consumer-orientated Home Energy Management System (HEMS).
The project provided insight into consumer energy use, as well as building and heating system performance, to enable the testing and development of new energy services more suited to a low-carbon economy.
We bring broad cross-sector experience to deliver transformative change
Bioinnovation for industry
What does the future hold?
Biology as a manufacturing tool is the next ‘industrial revolution’. Bioinnovation tools such as gene editing and directed evolution offer the opportunity to deliver the controlled, predictable, sustainable materials fabrication and recycling that can only be achieved using biological systems.
Bioinnovation now allows us to produce ‘tuned’ materials with specific properties across a wide range of industries, from pharmaceutical compounds to industrial enzymes to packaging materials. Biological approaches will be increasingly relevant to emerging applications such as plastics recycling, fashion and medical devices – driving both function and sustainability.
In the long term there is the potential for macro-scale biologically-mediated materials production for construction and industrial applications.
Turning trash into cash
Turning trash into cash
Releasing waste streams into the environment is adding, incrementally and relentlessly, to the global environmental crisis. With the sustainability imperative looming large, ‘net zero’ ambitions will be translated into global regulatory changes. So dealing with wastewater or flue gases will be even more expensive.
Our whitepaper explores the opportunities for using these nutrient-rich sources as the input for microalgae cultivation. The promise? Negative environmental impact replaced by valuable new co-products in a transformative, circular-economy model.
Our sustainable materials database is enabling innovation in the drive to net zero
The ambition to reduce or eliminate single-use plastics from the world’s supply chains is of course as laudable as it is essential. Shocking images of our polluted oceans have awoken a fire in consumers, many of whom display a strong resistance to single-use materials. In this blog we reveal details of a guide we've created that is helping innovators switch to alternatives.
Meet our experts
We can help you achieve the seemingly impossible