Creativity and sustainability - shurely shome mishtake

An upcoming conference in Edinburgh has its sights firmly set on the role that creativity can play in all areas of Scottish policy making, business and society.  While the so called ‘Creative Industries’ – film, art, broadcast, music, gaming – will inevitably be a focus, the conference sets out to identify how the wider business and government sectors can embrace the creative urge.  This may mean redesigning processes, products and business plans, embracing digital technologies or redefining the ways in which businesses and government deal with employees and indeed their customers.

This debate fuels my own view that the urge and need for reinvention also applies in business attitudes towards the environment and sustainability.  At the moment, as soon as the ‘E’ word is mentioned it induces well rehearsed arguments along the lines of “the debt crisis and recession are infinitely more important issues;” “head-hunters are telling me that demand for sustainability professionals has fallen off a cliff;” “we comply with legislation, and that is enough of a cost burden”, or “our customers are not asking about this stuff.”

While fully accepting that there are of course many and competing external pressures on business, there is a growing band of companies that have redefined the importance of sustainability and are seeing the rewards in cost savings, enhanced employee motivation, better management control and a much greater degree of competitive advantage.

With some noteable exceptions, the real business action on creativity and sustainability is taking place in small and medium sized enterprises.   One exception is Interface, world’s biggest producer of carpet tiles, founded by the late, great Ray Anderson in the 1970’s.  In the mid-1990’s he reinvented the business with environmental sustainability at its heart.  While still subject to the vagaries of the global market, Ray Anderson showed that sustainability and business success are not separate bedfellows. The company remains at the top of the flooring tree.

For small businesses, that decision to place sustainability to the fore and centre can be somewhat daunting, particularly as the first task is to decide what it means in its own context.  Having done so and defined priorities, the next major challenge is one of performance measurement, which means some data crunching.  All this takes time and resources, but there is lots of free advice and support out there from the likes of Zero Waste Scotland, Carbon Trust and business organisations such as FSB or the Scottish Food and Drink Federation.   Once the groundwork is done, the business can then review its performance or report to customers or financiers.

The latter are playing an increasingly interesting and important role as agents of sustainability, for if we accept the enhanced importance within a business, it inevitably has financial consequences.  These may be reducing overheads by diverting waste from landfill and turning this material into revenue as recyclate or an investment may be required in machinery to help process and store the waste.  Through having performance information to hand and a willingness to communicate, the business can respond to external scrutiny from customers and investors.  This scrutiny may be in the form of tendering requirements, where a ready response on questions about sustainability, not only saves on management time, but might help to win the business.

Where investment is required, the company’s bank may profit through working with a stronger business and providing asset finance for new plant or equipment.  Getting closer to the customer is an oft quoted banking aspiration, so, in the form of a sustainability dialogue, there is a way for the banks to [1] understand and de-risk their customers, existing and potential; [2] unearth new business from those customers and [3] promote some creativity and innovation within the bank’s own product development teams. 

The opportunities presented around sustainability are there for businesses and their financiers.  It just needs a bit of guts and some creativity.  That’s why I welcome the conference and its effort to provoke a debate on the wide ranging benefits of ‘creativity’ to Scotland’s future.

The Creativity Applied conference is organised by the RSA Fellows' Media, Creative Industries, Culture & Heritage Network and the Institute for Capitalising on Creativity, University of St Andrews.  It will take place on Monday 21st November 2011 at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 9 Queen Street, Edinburgh EH2 1JQ.  The conference is free, but bookings should be made before 16^th November http://creativityapplied.eventbrite.com