Is Innovation Alone Enough to Achieve a Sustainable Future?

When it comes to the built environment, much of our sector’s focus in the push toward net zero is directed towards tools, processes and technologies.
As a result, most headlines you’ll typically read on the sustainable future of the built environment hone in on the potential of innovations like selecting more sustainable construction materials, implementing material banks and adopting circular thinking.
There’s undoubtedly merit in these approaches. Yet while they can have an accumulative effect, they’re unlikely to bring about large, widescale change across the sector on their own. Instead, they’re victims of marketing hype and, in a vacuum, their impact is severely limited.
Why innovations fail to bring about change
Producing an innovation is one thing – bringing it into practice is another challenge entirely.
Why is this? Innovations that actually become the norm tend to bring about significant changes in working. Take artificial intelligence as an example. While this technology has brought with it much excitement, it’s also stoked fears of job losses, with 8 million jobs potentially at risk in the UK alone, according to the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR).
The truth is that change is often overwhelming for individuals. When people hear about a new tool or process, their first thought will be how it affects them, and in many cases, they’re expected to change the way they work.
To make change a success, the people who are most impacted by it – throughout all levels of an organisation’s hierarchy – need to be brought along on the journey.
As Prof Graeme Larsen, Associate Dean – Sustainability at the University College of Estate Management, notes, it’s also important to ask where these innovations are coming from:
“It's important for us to think where the innovations are coming from… like many sectors, the built environment sector is institutionalised in the way it does things. We need to look at what we would describe the ‘outsider’ or the ‘maverick’ and how they go about bringing in and creating new innovative ideas and challenge those kinds of norms within the sector.”
“The bigger players, whilst they're well-resourced and they do have R&D departments to a point, they're also locked into doing things in a certain way. They are at what we would describe as the regime level or the meso level of understanding this problem. The real innovators, I would suggest, are actually at the niche level.”
A combination of the above reasons is why, according to research by Gartner, half of change initiatives fail and just over a third (34%) are a clear success. In the context of sustainability in the built environment – a sector with an enormous role to play in the push to net zero – this level of success is far from sufficient.
The issue of change poses a question. Instead of focusing on the technologies and innovations needed to bring about sustainability in the built environment, should we shift our attention to the greater underlying obstacle we’re facing – the people?
Defining sustainability at an individual level
Sustainability means different things to different people. In the context of a business, this means different departments, teams and functions will all have different ideas and perceptions of how sustainability applies to their role.
It’s for this reason that consigning sustainability knowledge to teams or even individuals rarely reaps rewards. Without firsthand experience and perspective of the niche sustainability intricacies of each department, it’s impossible for these initiatives to holistically embed sustainability throughout an organisation.
Instead, these sustainability groups effectively become silos, divorced from the nuances within an organisation’s operations where new tools and technologies could have the greatest impact.
As Sheri-Leigh Miles, Founder and Director of NETpositive Futures, noted in an episode of UCEM’s BE Sustainable podcast:
“People are really tricky – they're not a homogenous mass… you can create a strategy, you can agree on a policy, but actually enacting those things requires humans to understand, engage and do things differently.”
This is why so many sustainable innovations, while exciting at first, fail to achieve maturity and reach the mainstream in larger organisations that are set in their ways.
The solution? Education
You could onboard the most cutting-edge and innovative technologies and tools, but without the buy-in and engagement throughout your organisation, you won’t realise the full benefits they have to offer.
Instead, imbuing an understanding of sustainability throughout the workforce (and across multiple organisational disciplines) through education is the key to significant change.
By embedding sustainability into your operations in this way, you’ll be in a stronger position to ensure innovative processes and technologies are adopted and championed in a way that fits the context of your business. This will help you reap rewards from your investment, rather than focusing on new tools that fail to deliver results.
UCEM’s MSc Innovation in Sustainable Built Environments and Level 7 Sustainability Business Specialist Apprenticeship were both launched to help address the challenge of sustainability in the built environment.
Both of these provisions are designed to upskill students with the knowledge and competencies they need to become change agents. Through building their critical thinking skills and literacy, they will be able to articulate concepts, challenge misconceptions and place their decisions in an environmental context.
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