Howard Brown was the keynote speaker at a recent KMI EHS conference. He brought along copies of Naked Value: 6 Things Every Business Leader Needs to Know About Resources, Innovation & Competition for all of the participants. One attendee called the ideas “revolutionary thinking,” while others captured many of his key messages as he spoke.

Howard Brown (center) sharing the new book Naked Value at a conference in Niagara Falls, Canada with Matt Airhart (L) and Laura Murphy (R) of KMI.

What’s New

Howard Brown is delivering a keynote address at a conference for environmental health and safety professionals hosted by EHS software company KMI. Brown will provide an outside-the-box perspective on how resource management is already shaping the future of business policy, corporate environmental management, and performance measurement. The conference takes place in Niagara Falls, Canada on May 16-17.

3D printers are becoming more affordable. The latest from Solidoodle ships for $500.

In this week’s Insights, read about manufacturing trends that are shifting global markets by changing the way products are made and reducing resource use at the same time. We also share examples of dMASS thinking, including sidewalks that double as Wi-Fi hotspots and an invisible, edible alternative to plastic meat packaging. Read proposals for transforming the global economy from linear to circular, and explore how Buckminster Fuller’s ideas are making a comeback and how they might be relevant to you.

Doing Better with Less

Shifting Trends in Manufacturing

Globally, manufacturers are retreating from off-shoring and bringing production closer to the market. This trend, characterized as reshoring or reverse globalization, translates into fewer resources being used for shipping, which lowers costs for corporations and lessens demand for raw materials. Companies are citing a variety of reasons for this trend including: cost savings for transportation and fuels, better access to customers, and managing risks associated with natural disasters by being closer to suppliers.

A different change is occurring in the way that products are being made. Digitization and 3D printing are enabling products to be manufactured with fewer materials and bringing manufacturing closer to customers. 3D printing continues to become more accessible and affordable to the average consumer, with Solidoodle releasing a printer that ships fully-assembled for under $500. Anyone with the ability to purchase 3D printer can manufacture products. What other benefits might these new technologies bring to customers? Justin Fox of the Harvard Business Review Group posits that the Internet age has been one of little innovation compared to the first half of the 20th century. Could 3D printing create the type of disruption that will jumpstart innovation and drastically enhance value to customers?

More examples of dMASS thinking this week include products combining functions, technology prototypes that eliminate materials, and research in nanotechnology allowing for greater cost-effectiveness and multipurpose materials.

Multi-Tasking Products

• iPavement is a lightweight sidewalk paving stone with embedded Wi-Fi technology. Users can take advantage of wireless internet as well as built-in apps providing maps, music, information on local foot traffic, and a digital library.
• A newly designed hybrid operating table allows hospitals to use the same space and equipment for performing surgery and for diagnostic imaging.
• Cell phones can be gathering places for harmful bacteria. PhoneSoap is a new device that sanitizes phones with UV-C light while charging.
• Repositionable wallpaper from Murals Your Way can be re-used up to 100 times, and requires no tools or adhesives for installation, saving multiple resources.

Prototypes, Concepts & Designs

• Electrolux “Heart of the Home” is a kitchen design concept for a stovetop that doesn’t require cookware.
• IBM is developing a lithium-air battery that breathes oxygen. The battery, which is part of IBM’s Battery 500 Project aimed at reliably powering electric vehicles for 500 miles, will be much smaller and lighter than conventional lithium-ion batteries and will have a longer lifespan.
• New technology will enable you to unlock your door without keys. The prototype from AT&T Labs (which could be embedded in phones or wristwatches) sends a unique vibration through a user’s bones that is then picked up by a receiver in the door handle, unlocking the door.
• A research firm in the UK is developing packaging for meat made from an antimicrobial peptide that is edible, extends shelf life, and eliminates vacuum packaging made from petroleum-based plastics.
• Belgian artist Steefan de Croock uses a unique method for creating murals that is subtractive as opposed to additive. Subtractive graffiti removes dirt or moss from a surface to create a design, instead of adding a material such as spray paint.
• The Air Turbine light is a 3D-printed lamp constructed from lightweight materials and powered by the wind.

Current Research

• Duke University researchers discovered a technique that manipulates the magnetism of nanoparticles within a liquid solution to form intricate 3D structures. This method opens the door to a more cost-effective way to build nanostructures that are more complex than what current techniques allow.
• MIT researchers created self-cleaning, anti-fogging, and anti-glare glass by depositing thin layers of nanomaterials on the surface. This material has potential applications for more efficient solar panels as well as touchscreens, microscopes, and cameras that would not have to be cleaned.

Don’t Miss

How Sustainability Can Save Your Business (Video)
(Andy Hall, Sustainable Value Cycle Solutions)

Andy Hall is a materials scientist and engineer who works on product development. In this video, Hall presents a new model for business and revenue growth, urging businesses to design for stakeholder value. But, Hall says, simply applying a new outlook on product innovation and value creation isn’t sustainable in our linear, “take-make-dispose” economy. He offers four steps to convert to a circular economy, including thinking about a value life cycle (with an emphasis on materials recovery), rather than a product life cycle.

Leasing Could Provide the Route to a Circular and Self-Supporting Economy
(Judith Merkies and Eric Lowitt, Guardian Sustainable Business)

Judith Merkies and Eric Lowitt look at a specific aspect of  developing a circular economy: leasing. They propose a model in which the incentives for manufacturers are:

… to maintain responsibility for their wares through the end of their useful lives, in order to gain access to mass amounts of materials they can use in place of virgin materials. A leasing society model prompts manufacturers to design sustainable products not through force or regulations, but through economic incentives. (Emphasis added.)

The authors note several markets where leasing is already working, including chemicals and tires.

Coming Up!

What’s New

We’re excited about our Virtual Book Tour in anticipation of the release of Naked Value: Six Things Every Business Leader Needs to Know About Resources, Innovation & Competition in mid-May. Bloggers interested in writing a review should visit our book tour page here. If you know any writers who might be interested, please share the link with them.

In Insights this week we’re exploring innovative solutions to eliminate waste, new methods for building lighter structures, and a concept for high speed travel with dramatic resource reduction. We introduce two thought-provoking articles on the importance of systems thinking for business and offer an exercise to encourage a more systems-based approach to problem solving.

Doing Better with Less

Creating Value by Removing or Re-using Waste

Waste: it’s a relevant topic for every business. Every day, more companies are outlining strategies to achieve zero waste to lower costs and to save resources. Even cities such as San Francisco are setting goals to achieve 100 percent zero waste to landfills by 2020 (having attained 78% thus far). Meanwhile, companies are bringing products to market that creatively remove waste from their products. For example, Monosol manufactures water-soluble films for multiple industries and is now engineering edible, dissolvable films for food packaging. This film eliminates the waste usually associated with the packaging of portable convenience-food products. A similar concept has been applied to the world of gardening with SoilWrap. After providing a plant protection during shipping, this compostable packaging can be placed in the ground along with the plant. Compostable bags for yard waste and biodegradeable mulch sheets for farm beds are other examples of how waste can be eliminated when a product is designed to be compostable.

The construction industry generates a significant amount of waste. An organization based out of New York City created a model for managing some of that waste for re-use.Build It Green! NYC salvages materials from construction sites throughout NYC and sells them at discounted rates. Another strategy for doing better with less in construction is to decrease the amount of new materials needed for a project. Iowa-base company ReWall builds construction materials using items that might otherwise end up in a landfill, such as plastic-coated cups, plates, and containers. The company’s process makes use of discarded items and does so without having to use glue, water, or other chemicals to create their products.

Here are some of the other examples dMASS thinking we found this week:

Methods for Lightweighting

• 

  Mountain Hardware's new Hoopla tent uses just one center pole and a hoop in the tent's roof for a lightweight structure.

  Hoopla 4 is a new tent design based on the concept of tensegrity. The design requires just one pole (which doubles as a walking stick) and a hoop inside the roof of the tent and then relies on tension in the fabric to hold up the tent. The Hoopla weighs just two pounds.

• Researchers from the University of Stuttgart are developing dynamic, lightweight structures using a system of hydraulic drives. These wooden structures require fewer amounts of materials because they are able to compensate for load changes (like snow on a roof) in a way that passive structures cannot.
• Smaller, lighter motors may soon lead to more affordable space exploration. Research in Switzerland has led to a prototype for a compact motor weighing just a few ounces that will lower the costs associated with satellites’ production, launch, and travel.
• Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a technique for producing printed electronics that are the weight and thickness of a piece of paper. They also created a prototype for a plastic solar cell.

New Gadgets: Mobile & Multifunctional

• Only one third the size of a credit card, PayTag is a near field communication sticker that lets you make payments with any mobile phone.
• Lenscaster is a device attaching an SLR camera lens to an iPad, making it possible to document, edit, and transmit photos and videos using one compact instrument.
• Magic Cube is a portable, wireless device that projects a virtual keyboard onto any surface for use with tablets and mobile phones.

Research and Innovations Improving Resource Use

• A French company is developing a wind turbine that converts desert air into drinking water through a process of condensation. The process works using electricity generated with the turbine and does not require any external power.
• Nuclear and coal plants require vast amounts of water to operate their steam generators.  Scientists at the U.S Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are developing a class of nanoparticles that reduce the amount of water lost in this process.
• A German energy start-up is developing solar panels that are flexible, extremely light, and perform well in low-light and very hot conditions, when conventional panels are not as productive.
• Evacuated tube transport (ETT) is a concept for high-speed, frictionless travel that operates without fossil fuels, instead relying on magnetic levitation for propulsion. ETT would reportedly require lighter materials for vehicles and infrastructure than current high-speed trains and travel as fast as 4,000 mph.

Don’t Miss

Systems thinking, which emphasizes interconnectedness, is emerging as a valuable tool for business.

The megatrends companies must face to meet sustainability challenges,
(Jo Confino, Guardian Sustainable Business Blog, April 2012)

Jo Confino uses a new report by consulting firm KPMG and details from his own experience on an integrated development project to explain the importance of systems thinking. KPMG’s report makes the case that any trend projections that ignore the system of “sustainability megaforces” are inadequate for strategic business decisions, and that systems thinking is essential for solving the complex and interconnected problems businesses now face:

Systems thinking … is an important way to assess and manage new risks and uncover risks that were previously unidentified. For example, a company may understand its direct dependency on water, but may not have thought about how the supply of its material resources could be impacted by increasing water scarcity…

Read KPMG’s full report here.

U.S. Competitiveness Project—A Need for Systems Thinking,
(Andrew McKeon, Harvard Business School Forum, April 2012)

Andrew McKeon argues, “Fixing U.S. competitiveness will require a systems perspective much broader and more holistic than American management has practiced in the last 40 years.” He describes problems associated with the management mindset dominant in business today and explains how that mindset needs to change:

If we are to really address U.S. competitiveness, we must stop looking at issues, businesses and markets as isolated entities, and instead understand that the future of U.S. competitiveness lies in how well we address the systems issues facing the global economy and the planet over the next 20-40 years.

He also states that sustainability should be the organizing principle for U.S. competitiveness and explains the interconnectedness of business and natural systems:

Simply put, sustainability is about getting the alignment right between how the global economy works and how the planet works. To the extent business operations support that alignment, business is sustainable and will prosper; to the extent business operations are out of alignment, business is unsustainable and will deteriorate. The key to U.S. competiveness lies in how well we plan and organize for that alignment.

Think dMASS

Coming Up!

Howard Brown has several speaking engagements coming up this spring and summer. Stay tuned for more information.

What’s New

Welcome to this week’s edition of Insights!  As you know, we always welcome input from readers. Here’s an interesting story recently shared with us:

The 10 kg copper lamp.

The value of copper has grown, so much so that it’s often the target of thieves who sell it for scrap. Thinking that copper is a good investment, German designers created a desk lamp made from 10 kilograms of copper. The lamp serves a functional purpose while gaining in value. A reader shared the lamp with us because he thought it was a wasteful use of a valuable resource. What do you think? We thought it was a fascinating commentary on the value of raw materials, as well as evidence that more people are aware of resource supply and price pressures. Do you know of any other functional objects sold as investments in raw materials?

As usual, we’ve been searching for the latest products, strategies, designs and research aimed at improving resource use and we share them below. Also this week, Don’t Miss focuses on what resource businesses might do to sustain themselves and gain a competitive advantage, and Think dMASS explores how rules and regulations can limit resource-saving innovation.

Doing Better with Less

Each week, we share exciting scientific and product research that will enable companies to create products that do better with less. Even more exciting is the fact that more dMASS-type products are coming to market all the time. This week, we found Scanstick, which is the smallest full-page color scanner available. It can scan a full page in 4 seconds with one sweep, offering the functionality of a large scanner with far less material and convenient mobility. We also found a group of San Francisco entrepreneurs that are designing and building bicycles made from folded sheets of metal. The bicycles are reportedly lighter, stronger and cheaper to construct than standard aluminum frames. In Japan, a bank is introducing ATMs that scan a user’s palm for identification, eliminating the need for debit cards. The bank’s slogan for the ATMs: “You are your cash card.” Another Japanese company is producing and marketing a self-repairing film to protect and extend the life of touch screens. The film can self-heal scratches at room temperature in as few as 10 seconds. Agricel based out of Dubai launched a new agricultural production method called film farming. The method doesn’t require soil and cuts water use by 90 percent and fertilizer use by 80 percent. Finally, Chrysler’s 2013 Dodge Dart will contain the first wireless recharger in a vehicle. The technology will charge any mobile device placed in the car’s central console, eliminating the need to buy more of those travel chargers that we all keep losing.

Sometimes doing better with less doesn’t require new technology or a change in products, but a change in process. For example, companies across the US are downsizing their physical office space as a strategy to save money. Average square foot per worker has dropped significantly as companies eliminate private offices in favor of open, shared workspaces. Meanwhile, the CEO of Zipcar reports that every one of their cars takes 15 off the road because Zipcar members choose not to purchase vehicles as a result of having access to the car-sharing service. CEO Scott Griffith also says he sees car ownership, not rental car companies, as Zipcar’s competition.

Here are more examples of efforts to do better with less, plus a small sampling of current research:

Combining Functions

• A researcher from the University of California-Riverside has been developing a portable nanosensor that detects pesticides and other chemicals in real time. The sensor has potential uses in Homeland Security, the military, agriculture, and industry and could be incorporated into cell phones.
• A husband and wife design team created a piece of furniture that places focus on long-term functionality.  Gro Furniture converts from a crib to a toddler bed, play table and then a desk, so it can be used from birth through young adulthood.
• A dual-use stylus can be used for writing on tablets and paper, eliminating the need for a specialized tool.
• Engineers from Riga Technical University in Latvia developed a jacket that harvests energy from human motion.  The generator incorporated into the jacket consists of a set of coils and a small, lightweight magnet.
• In the UK, renewable energy companies are looking to create value from abandoned mine sites by converting them for wind, solar and geothermal power generation. There are multiple benefits of converting these sites including reuse of existing infrastructure, and the opportunity to create local employment.

Researching Materials & Methods

• Dan Salvucci of we2geeks.com wrote about research using nanotechnology to reduce C02 emissions.  MIT researchers have discovered that nanoparticles of copper mixed with gold reduce the amount of energy needed to convert C02 to fuels.
• Research at the University of Cambridge has demonstrated that using plastic for flexible electronics creates circuits that are fast, inexpensive, easy to produce, and have low power consumption.  This type of circuitry has broad applications such as RFID tags and transparent displays in car windshields.
• Therapeutic nanoparticles that target cancer cells are shown to be more effective in smaller doses than traditional chemotherapy in human clinical trials by researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
• BAE Systems “Liquid armor” from offers soldiers more protection while allowing for greater mobility.  The lightweight armor consists of a gel-based material that actually gets stronger upon impact.
• A new study finds that painting urban rooftops white saves energy by keeping buildings significantly cooler and reducing their air conditioning needs.

Don’t Miss

Why Business Must Shift from Resource Managers to Resource Leaders,
(Mary Stacey, Marilyn Taylor and David Legge, GreenBiz.com, April 13, 2012)

The global population continues to grow and is predicted to reach 9 billion by 2050.  Consumer demand expands as millions of people enter the middle class in China, India, Southeast Asia and Latin America.  The price of raw materials is unpredictable, while concern for the impact of resource demand on the environment increases.  For these reasons, the authors of this article argue that business leaders need to re-evaluate how they manage resources to remain competitive in challenging times. They call for “a shift in mind-set from simply managing resources to practicing resource leadership.” They see the current model of resource management operating as follows:

Resource producers have always been constrained by their view that the primary goods they sell are commodities with which they compete on the basis of price alone; their customers determine how they should be used. That approach, however, has led producers to the status quo: a largely reactive position with a short time horizon, and little opportunity to differentiate themselves from competitors.

Resource leadership, on the other hand, encourages a proactive approach that views resources in the scope of interdependent systems, considers the life-cycle of resource-use from extraction to end-use, and emphasizes economic value without diminishing ecological or environmental impacts.  In other words, resource leaders would foster long-term, systemic planning–a shift from the short-term model outlined above. The authors write:

Imagine a company that embraced this new model. As a resource producer at the beginning of the value chain, it would contribute solutions and expertise — culled from working directly with the materials at the earliest stages — in collaborating with its customers to find cost savings, reduce waste, and improve service.

Coming Up!

Naked Value: Six Things Every Business Leader Needs to Know About Resources, Innovation & Competition is due to arrive in mid-May! We’re inviting bloggers to participate in the book’s launch. If you’re interested in participating, you can learn more here!

Naked Value: Six Things Every Business Leader Needs to Know About Resources, Innovation & Competition is due to arrive in mid-May! We’re inviting bloggers to participate in the book’s launch. For more information, check out the virtual book tour page now!

What’s New

A handheld flashlight that kills bacteria without soap or water, long-lasting batteries powered by eggshells, conductive fabric that serves as a lightweight power source for soldiers, and the video game industry’s plans to move away from physical products: these are a few of the resource-saving technologies, innovative materials, and creative methods in this issue of Insights. After you explore this week’s examples, try the systems thinking exercise in “Think dMASS” and then read an announcement about the upcoming dMASS book Naked Value.

The portable plasma flashlight kills bacteria without soap and water.

Doing Better with Less

Technology & Design Influencing Resource Performance

Don’t Miss

Say Hello to the Brave New World of Console Gaming
(Jeff Bakalar, cnet.com, March 30, 2012)

The gaming industry is moving away from physical ownership of games. Under a different business model, players would subscribe to a game and access the game online, rather than buying the game on a disc. The change is primarily due to game piracy, but may ultimately lead to the end of video games in the physical form, as well as the retail space needed to display them. Used game retailers and rental businesses, who are likely focused on competing with one another, would be significantly impacted by a shift to virtual products.

Coming Up!

We’re planning a blogger tour to coincide with the release of our book Naked Value in May. Look for more details next week!

In the meantime, keep in touch on Twitter and Facebook.