Max Gladwell

A natural consequence of technological innovation is that it produces green results. Does that make the innovation green? Or is that just the nature of true innovation?

Editor’s note: This is our first guest post for Pop!Tech.

We’re living in the dawn of the new green age. Corporate leaders, school teachers, politicians, and the media are all embracing the new sustainable ethos. For some, it’s a moral imperative and the lens through which everything is viewed. For others, green is a post script, as if to say, “By the way, it’s also green.” Green is now a part of our everyday conversations. We’re more conscious about when we’re being green and when we’re not. When we go out of our way to recycle and when we cut corners at the expense of our carbon footprint. This green awareness has made it highly marketable. There’s a market for green. And this is function of not just the virtues of green but how we now approach green.

The new green age (Green 2.0) is fundamentally different from the old green age (Green 1.0). Twentieth-century green was anti-corporation, anti-development, and anti-people. Humans were largely the problem, and that saddled green with a certain negative stigma. The messages were negative and the perception was negative. Green wasn’t about solutions or innovation. It was about opposition. It was about being against whatever was not green. And to be associated with green was to be associated with this negativity.

That psychology has shifted. Twenty-first century green is pro-business, pro-people, and pro-environment. It’s positive and forward looking. It’s driven by technology and pragmatic idealism. It’s guided by economics and the realities of human behavior. The hallmark of the new green age is innovation. Radical, systems innovation. Because we’re not going to protest or petition our way of global warming or other environmental crises. We’re going to innovate. And this won’t be for the sake of being green. We’re going to innovate because that’s what we’ve always done. Because while the market for green is a new thing, the market for innovation dates to the stone age.

The question we have is about the relationship between innovation and green. Is there a causal connection? Is one dependent on the other? Is it possible that true innovation just happens to be green and that green is just the benefit of true innovation?

To explore this question more fully, we’ll look at the following companies and products: eBay, Swiffer, Apple, Zumbox, Kindle 2, Headplay, and FastSkinz.

eBay

The online auction marketplace eBay launched in 1998. This was at the peak of Web 1.0 and right at the end of Green 1.0. eBay itself was truly innovative. It made a market for people’s junk, the stuff that might otherwise end up in landfills. It later evolved into a way for thousands to earn a living working from home. Many of these people are essentially in the business of recycling. Despite creating these incredible efficiencies on a global scale, though, eBay’s green messaging was curiously absent in these early years. In fact, it’s only recently, in Green 2.0, that eBay has celebrated and even acknowledged its green qualities.

The company recently launched the eBay Green Team microsite, which proudly states that “86 million buyers and sellers on eBay have reused over $100 billion worth of products since 1998. By giving used toasters and toys a longer life and keeping sweaters and cellphones out of landfills, they’re making a big difference for the planet.”

Being green clearly was not eBay’s intent in ‘98, nor is it today. The intent was to create market efficiencies using innovative Internet technologies. But there’s no denying that green is a major benefit of the eBay service. Whether it was a conscious decision or not, eBay chose not to promote its greenness during Green 1.0. There wasn’t a market for green back then, but that’s because being green carried a negative stigma. It would have meant that eBay was against something, because that was the nature of Green 1.0. Today, green means that you’re for something. That you’re for progress, solutions, and innovation…which is what eBay has always been about.

Swiffer

This Swiffer floor cleaning product from Proctor & Gamble debuted a few years ago, just as Green 2.0 was gaining momentum. And while the market for green presents opportunities for true innovations, there are also risks of overreaching and crossing the line into so-called greenwashing.

Swiffer designer Gianfranco Zaccai wrote a sustainable design piece for Business Week, in which he claimed that, “Cleaning a floor with a Swiffer uses almost no water at all and the only disposable waste is a sheet of paper and a few squirts of cleaning agent.” He goes on to say that it makes “a small contribution to the sustainability of our planet.”

This was quickly seized upon by Inhabitat as a blatant greenwash: “We believe that the Swiffer story is an excellent example of greenwashing – making an unproven claim about a product or company’s green benefit, when the product in fact has a negative environmental impact. The Swiffer requires the continual purchase of toxic chemical sheets that wind up in landfill – hardly a sustainable design solution.”

If P&G and Zaccai wanted to be green, they would have used non-toxic chemicals and made the sheets biodegradable. But it still wouldn’t qualify this product as a true innovation. Just a new way to clean your floors. The point here is that it doesn’t work both ways. Just because something is green doesn’t make it truly innovative. In the case of the Swiffer, though, it’s neither truly innovative nor green.

Apple

You may have seen Apple’s television ads and media coverage about its green laptops. More recently, the new Mac Mini was billed as the world’s most efficient PC, drawing just 13 watts when idle.

The Apple brand is synonymous with innovation. In addition to the great computers, software, and gadgets, think about the impact iPod and iTunes have had on the production, transport, and disposal of CDs. In fact, we recently switched to Apple TV and happily wait for movies to be available for download rather than driving to the video store or having DVDs shipped via Netflix. Plus, since Apple computers are so much better than PCs, they tend to have longer lives. But we don’t like Apple because it’s a green company or because its products are green. We like Apple because it’s truly innovative. The green is found as a consequence and benefit of these innovations.

With regard to its new Mac Mini and MacBook lines, extending the battery life by consuming less energy (making them more efficient) is a quality that enhances performance. It also happens to be green. And since green is a marketable quality, Apple is taking advantage of it. That’s not a bad thing, provided the efficiency claims are accurate. However, we should have no illusions about the company’s intent. It was not to produce the greenest laptop possible. It was to produce the best laptop possible, and that laptop happens to be more green than previous models.

Zumbox

Zumbox is the first all-digital postal mail system. The company has created an online counterpart (a Zumbox) for every physical mailbox/street address in the U.S. It’s as if the United States Postal Service (USPS) went completely digital, enabling people to send and receive mail online using the same addressing system i.e. street, city, state, zip code. This means the paper mail that companies are currently printing and sending can also be sent digitally. The paper version goes to your mailbox, and the paperless version goes to your Zumbox. The address is one and the same. When you view the paperless version in your Zumbox, you can discontinue receipt of the paper version. This makes for the seamless migration from paper to paperless.

With the exception of marketers, Zumbox offers the service for free to anyone who sends mail. Companies that send paper statements, bills, notifications, and other correspondence can save handsomely on their paper, printing, and postage costs. It also frees the everyday consumer from their physical address by giving them secure access to their mail online.

If we were not in Green 2.0 and green was not a marketable quality, Zumbox would still exist. By questioning the practicality (the sanity) of printing digital files so they can be trucked or flown across the country, Zumbox has created tremendous efficiencies for business, government, and consumers. It just happens that the Zumbox solution is quite green and has broadly postitive implications for the environement. It therefore qualifies as a true innovation. (Disclosure: Zumbox is a client of Max Gladwell founder Rob Reed.)

Kindle 2

Amazon’s Kindle 2 is the company’s second-generation electronic book reader. With 3G wireless, it can download books in about 60 seconds. The battery lasts for days thanks to the E-Ink technology, which makes it incredibly energy efficient, and it can hold 1,500 books. That’s 1,500 fewer books that have to be processed, printed, shipped, and disposed of. But the Kindle 2 isn’t some effort on the part of Amazon to be green. Rather, it’s a truly innovative way to distribute and consume books and other types of written material. This quote from a Fortune article says it best:

“Buying paper and ink, printing, and delivering a newspaper or magazine can account for more than 50% of the overall cost of producing the periodical. E-readers also turn out to be good for the environment – fewer trees are cut down to make paper.”

In the four-page online article, that was the only mention of any environmental upside. It basically says, “By the way, the Kindle 2 is green.”

Then again, you may not want to read books on the Kindle 2. And that certainly doesn’t mean you’re not green.

FastSkinz

FastSkinz is a new vinyl car-wrap material that claims to reduce wind drag on automobiles and thereby make them faster and more efficient. The parent company, SkinzWraps, is based in Dallas, Texas, and we can say with certainty that this is not a group of hippies trying to save the planet.

The FastSkinz material is dimpled like that of a golf ball. The material’s rough surface, which has also compared to shark skin, creates a turbulent layer of air that enables the object (a car) to more easily slice through the air. If the name is any indication, the original motivation was auto racing, since SkinzWraps does a lot of work with NASCAR teams. This isn’t exactly the greenest crowd. It turns out, though, that FastSkinz increases fuel efficiency by 18% – 25%.

Headplay

Headplay is a consumer electronics company that debuted at the Demo conference a few years ago. It’s a video goggle that simulates a 52-inch monitor at about 10 feet away. It supports HD and 3D video and functions as a standalone portable computer. The market is primarily gamers, but it’s also suited to movies and Internet browsing.

How can it also be green? The Headplay consumes a small fraction of the energy of a full-sized computer tower and monitor. What if the millions of computer terminals that fill China’s Internet cafes could be replaced with Headplay? We’re talking the equivalent of taking several coal-fired power plants offline. But that’s just the nature of this truly innovative product. Green is not an intent nor a feature of Headplay. It’s jsut an unintended consequence.

Conclusion

In the novel Atlas Shrugged, the hero John Galt develops a breakthrough motor than runs on clean, renewable, and infinitely abundant energy (static electricity). The story takes place more than a half-century before the term “clean tech” is coined. Galt has no aspirations to be green or to market green. His objectives are to innovate and to profit from his innovations. Green is just a benefit…and one that would have gone unnoticed in his day.

While Green 2.0 has created a market for green in the modern era, we should be conscious of what this means. True innovation has existed since the dawn of man, and by virtue of innovating, we create certain efficiencies and benefits. By definition, many of these are green. But only recently have we been able to capitalize on them. As the above examples illustrate, though, the greatest (and greenest) innovations don’t start with any green intent. If they had, the results may not have been the same becasue you can’t design something around its benefits. We should not let the new market for green influence how and why we innovate. Since true innovation is always green, we should keep our eye on the ball and continue on the pure path of true innovation.

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