Philips Theory Of Sustainable Innovation

Sustainable innovation exploring a new paradigm is a paper that has been written by Dorothea Seebode (now Dorothea Ernst). She holds a PhD in Physics and she has worked at the Philips Lighting department for 10 years. Most of the time she worked as project manager in R&D, internal consulting and technology management. After this she has been the senior director Sustainability at Philips Research from April 2006 till July 2011. Here her job was “embedding sustainability as a business and innovation driver”(Philips article). She represented Philips at the WBCSD Vision 2050 project and besides this she is a LEAD Fellow and a board member of the Green Economy Coalition. This Paper has been published in June 2011, so it was published at the end

The first two parts are about the theory of sustainable innovation, based on the WBCSD Vision 2050 the last two parts are about how this is integrated into the four strategies of Philips. Its goal is to integrate the long term ideas into concrete actions or as it is said in the paper:” this paper offers a tool to link Philips’ innovation and sustainability agendas” (Paper). To do so the paper is addressed to Philips and its partners, but it can also be used by innovators who want to take steps towards the WBCSD vision 2050.

The paper

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) Vision 2050 is a report made by an eighteen month long effort of 29 leading companies from 14 industries. It describes a desired future sketched around three questions: What does a sustainable world look like? How can we realize it? What are the roles business can play in ensuring more rapid progress toward that world?

Then it describes a pathway of steps based on 9 different tracks that need to be taken to get there. It gives companies a description of the long-term vision and a possible pathway to get there.

The paper + Vision 2050 the new agenda for business in brief +

It states that we overuse “earth’s services” and that it gets worse every year. This is made painfully clear during the earth overshoot day. This is the day that we used more resources that year than the planet can provide. This is in line with A safe operating space for humanity by Johan RockstrÖm. He states that we are overstepping earth’s boundaries, because of the growing reliance on fossil fuel. Out of the 9 categories, we are overstepping 3 of them: the biodiversity loss, nitrogen cycle and climate change.

In Baker’s Sustainable Development it is said that we need to acknowledge the limits to growth, because “ecological processes underpin the rest of human activity, and, if these are impaired, then a condition for the very possibility of human activity is impaired too”(Dobson 1998: 44) (baker p21)

All of this while there are people who cannot even meet their basic needs. Baker (2006) argues that, according to the Brundtland concept of sustainable development, we need to make a link between the needs of the poor and the wants of the rich, because the poor cannot meet their fundamental needs and the rich consume too much. That the rich consume too much can be due to the cause that the rich think that increased consumption equals increased development and wealth. (Baker p20)

Radical change is needed to reach the WBCSD Vision 2050, the needs of the poor should be fulfilled and wants of the rich need to be