Welcome to this
fantastic Canon Customer Experience Center.
And you can see these wonderful animals
over there called printers,
which you can explore at your leisure during the day.
But today is really about thinking.
It's about thinking about the future of the book,
the printed book, and all of the forms of book.
Or maybe we should call it content.
What is it which we really deliver to people.
And we have people from 32 different countries here this year.
32 different countries, which is fantastic.
How many of you are publishers? Put your hand up if you are a publisher.
We have more publishers than ever before this year.
Put your hand up if you are a printer.
Okay, put your hand up if you're from Canon.
Put your hand up if you're somebody else who has not put your hand up yet.
Okay.
So we have a diversity of people.
And as Peter said, this is a community, a community of people who love books.
Who love publishing, who love content.
And hopefully a group of people who want to make the world better
through books and through that content, too.
Our theme this year:
finding new sustainable and profitable growth.
Growth is what you said you wanted to talk about.
You told us that last year.
But it has to be sustainable and profitable,
if you want to be a successful business, loved by
consumers, and customers in today's world.
This is a journey which we started nine years ago.
So if you think back to 2014,
was anybody here in 2014? Put your hand up again.
Look at that. Fantastic.
So we have three, four, five, six people.
And I am particularly delighted that Dalia is here this year.
So she's joined the advisory board. Dalia is from Egypt.
And I remember she stood up.
She stood up back in 2014.
You can see her picture here and she talked about publishers need to change.
Publishers need to think about the bigger picture of the opportunity
for content in all the different ways, the different platforms
and the different formats which people can engage with content
and potentially make much more money, new types of revenue streams from it.
And you can see from the 2014 when we set out a future vision,
we then started to talk about consumer insights.
And we were joined by Canvas8,
one of the world's leading ethnographic research companies.
And we have three fantastic personas again this year,
Uli, Wolfgang and Francesca, who Nick Morris introduce then.
I'm delighted that Jemima Cox is going to talk to us a bit later
about how consumer insight matters more than ever in understanding sustainability.
We talked about business models, how they were changing.
Look at every different industry.
The business models are the biggest form of innovation.
We talked about the smart book and we said,
What is the heart of the DNA of a book today?
Is it the customer?
Is it the content?
Is it the printed formats?
What is at the heart of it?
And we had different opinions.
We talked about data.
We talked about the power of communities.
That was a fantastic one.
So really learning from places like Harley-Davidson and Rapha
and Lego in terms of understanding
how to bring consumers together with a passion.
Think about that in the world of books.
And then we talked about the opportunities of change as the pandemic struck
and how that was accelerating the need to change.
And last year, we had sustainable innovation
competition and really finding some of the more radical startups
disrupting our industry right now,
although maybe sometimes we don't even see it.
So sustainability has become a big, big agenda.
We know we need to massively reduce our carbon emissions
in a short period of time.
But we also know that books
can be an incredible force for good.
We also know that books can make a big difference socially to the world.
One of the things which I'd really like you to
think about today is not just how can we reduce our carbon
emissions, reduce our waste,
but how can we increase our positive impact on the world?
How can we be a force for good?
How can we have more social benefit and how can we use that
to change people's perception of the value of a book?
And in many cases, you know, maybe it's worth more to them
than ever before.
And if
you look at the world of sustainability, there's many different models
of sustainability.
John Elkington started off with the triple bottom line, the three P's.
We then had Ellen MacArthur developing the circular business model
where you give back what you took from the world in terms of resources.
And the people like Microsoft, for example, then said,
how can you not just become net zero, but how can you become net positive,
so that you actually give back to the world more than you take away from the world,
in total, environmental and social things?
And that's an interesting one.
How can you become a net positive company?
And then we found other models more recently.
So Kate Raworth, a leading economist,
talks about the Doughnut Model of economics.
And if you go to Berlin or Amsterdam, or Copenhagen,
you would see Doughnut Cities currently being developed.
A Doughnut City is when it lives in between the safe and just space for humanity,
where you do more for society
and you do less damage to the world.
So you do more and you do less damage in doing more.
So it's more positive and it's less negative.
So thinking about
that combination of the two really matters.
And if you look across the world, this has become a huge, important
challenge, but also opportunity for companies everywhere.
The world's most sustainable company
in 2022, according to the biggest ranking in the world by Corporate Knights,
is this company, Vestas.
But Vestas,
the Danish wind energy turbine company,
is not just the most sustainable company because of what it does itself.
But it's what it enables other people to do.
So it's not what you do yourself in your company, in your factory
that matters, but it's also what you enable other people to do.
And of course, through knowledge and education and content,
you can enable huge numbers of people to do better.
So Vestas is number one. As we look down the list,
we can see many of the companies.
The number two is Chr. Hansen, which is a food ingredients company
making better food for the world, more sustainable, easier to eat,
more growable for farmers.
Autodesk is a 3D design company, industrial business to business company,
helping people to design better, more sustainable circular systems.
Schneider Electric from France is number four.
They store the energy, so it's all about battery storage.
You get the solar, the wind energy,
but you need to store it for when people need it.
And so that's why Schneider is number four.
So all of these companies have really succeeded by thinking differently.
In most cases, it's about enabling more than they do themselves.
I sat down during the pandemic and I wrote my tenth book.
This is, this is my tenth book.
And I wasn't happy.
I wasn't happy with my publisher, to be honest with you,
because they insisted it had to be in this this standardized format,
the hardback, the 300 pages
in the standardized way of working. It takes six months to print.
It's printed in one place, and it's then takes six months to deliver
to other places across the world, which is never when I need it.
So I do have problems, but I also love my publisher
because they help me to share ideas with the world.
And I interviewed 100 CEOs
from across the world to find out what are they doing right now?
And they are the big shifts.
So instead of just thinking of yourself as a profit machine,
companies are really thinking about how they can make better progress in the world,
instead of just surviving, finding new forms of growth, new ways
in which they can grow, instead of just competing on being slightly
cheaper or slightly better than the competition,
how can we do something much more radical.
Instead of just thinking about technology to innovate,
how can we innovate in a more creative, human way
to engage people emotionally?
And actually if you look through all of that,
you see companies changing faster, transforming themselves.
Many of the industries, look at the fashion industry, for example.
Sustainability is not just something which is compliance.
It's not just something which is nice to do.
It is fundamental to competitive advantage in the fashion industry.
If you look at the automotive industry, you all know that are the companies
who are still trying to make the traditional automobile,
and there's companies who are rapidly
shifting and disrupting the world and moving to electric.
The most valuable car companies in the world,
Tesla, but also NIO, BYD.
And what's interesting is
that there's the old companies, the new companies,
the old companies are desperate to catch up.
They've left it too late.
Herbert Diess from Volkswagen says, "you know, we should have
started this transformation ten years earlier."
And he now wants to make Volkswagen a software company
Tesla actually wants to be a charging company.
BYD wants to make cars cheaper than anybody else in the world,
driverless cars.
And they cost a tenth of the price of a Tesla.
So you can see an industry where sustainability is massively
disrupting it and shaking up the future success
But what if that happens to our industry?
What if people start to realize, just like they realize in the world of fashion
or automobiles, that actually there's many unsustainable practices.
How are we then going to accelerate ourselves towards the future?
So sustainability today is not about compliance.
Yes, you can do the good things in terms of reducing your emissions,
to use less water, to use less paper.
Yes, you can employ a more diverse workforce.
Yes, you can take ethical investment.
But really, the challenge
is to say, how does sustainability become your core business?
How does it become the way in which you work and the reason
why you work and the way in which you achieve your competitive advantage?
It's the reason people pay more.
And so they shift from just thinking about compliance through to adding value
through to making it the core way in which you do business.
The business models which you have you see across every different industry.
It is now business as usual.
And this is a way of achieving success.
And if you look at the success across companies, look at the global 100
from Corporate Knights. They massively outperform
other companies in terms of the stock market, in terms of the net
value created for shareholders over years.
But also consumers increasingly,
we'll see in a moment,
want a sustainable product and will prefer one.
You see the growth of the circular economy,
$4.5 trillion according to Accenture.
$10 trillion,
if you can make that shift in terms of the 17 SDGs,
according to the United Nations.
Look at the amount
of money in terms of addressing climate change.
But also look at the amount of money going into sustainable investment funds.
So if you want to get investment
and you're a sustainable company, you're more likely to get it in today's world.
And then look at these factors.
Gen Z, the young people of today, want to work
for companies who do better for the world.
Look beyond that.
People will pay more for something
which is better for the world or better for them.
This is work done by Nielsen, the leading global market research
company across the world.
It looks at how much more will people pay for a sustainable product.
So maybe in energy,
something which is more commoditized and comes through
the same pipe or invisible, they will pay about 20% more.
But if you go
to many types of food, think about yourselves how much you do pay
for organic eggs
or milk
or coffee, fair trade, organic coffee.
And suddenly, if you look in the supermarket,
you'll see prices which are two times, sometimes even three times more.
People are prepared to pay that.
It's better for them, it's
healthier for them, it's better for the world in some ways.
So there is an opportunity
if you can communicate it in the right way,
and if you kind of connect it all together in the way, there's an opportunity
to make a lot more money to grow your business more profitably.
If you can actually do that. Now, of course, not everybody does
what they say.
And you can say that in Spain, for example,
66% of consumers say they're going to buy sustainable,
but only 34% do. The Spanish are the worst.
I don't know why. But you can see that there is a tail off effects
and not everybody is going to choose sustainable products.
But a significant number do.
And a significant number, particularly younger people will pay more for them.
So there's food for thought.
The other thing is that if you look across companies across the world,
you see increasingly companies want to be certified as sustainable.
The best form of certification is becoming a B Corporation.
Put your hand up if you are or have explored B Corps.
Okay. So that's about five of us.
That's a really interesting area to look at.
So B Corporation looks at all the different factors which come together
in terms of how you work internally and the impact
which you have on your consumers, your customers and the outside world.
The criteria for it is quite robust. But it also gives you a set of
standard criteria which you can compare against your peers
and you can compare against different industries.
So this is a great way of starting to understand
where should you focus your efforts and what kind of things can you do.
So if you go to bcorporation.net,
you'll find all of the information there.
And you can see how many companies in Europe have already done this.
Not that many in Germany, actually. You can see only 37.
But ten times more in the U.K., for example.
And across the whole of Europe, a huge number.
And then you can see on the right some analysis which looks at which are
the most ethical and sustainable companies in the world across different sectors.
And I know you're going to say to me, well, who's the publisher there?
And actually, it's a really interesting Spanish publisher.
You can see them there.
And they actually scored 99 out of a possible 200.
So there's still lots of work they can do.
No company is perfect.
So there's still lots of work which they can do.
And this company, Cuento de Luz,
based in Madrid, which was developed by Ana.
You can see her here.
So, Ana Eulate.
She developed a beautiful book publishing business, telling children's stories.
She does all of the sustainable, environmentally good things.
So she uses stone paper, for example.
But beyond that,
she's saying how can I tell a fantastic story?
How can I support the big causes which matter in the world?
How can I engage people in the things which really matter to them?
And so through storytelling, she's
changing the minds of people.
And she's a fabulous person and a multi award
winning publisher, a small company, but phenomenally interesting.
So I encourage you to think about how can you grow your business
in a better way?
There's good growth and there's bad growth.
And that's provocative.
I want you to ask yourself,
how good is your growth?
And we're going to explore this over time.
Because if you look at this chart here, you can think about it in terms of growth,
which is unsustainable or growth which is sustainable.
And you'll all tell me that sustainable growth is better.
Yeah.
And then along the bottom, we're business people, too.
You've got profitable growth and unprofitable growth.
And you can have lots of ways of defining profit.
But if you take the simple kind of way of thinking,
making more revenue than the costs, and then think about
how can you drive profitable growth at the same time.
But you want to do both.
And that's the real challenge.
How can sustainability drive innovation?
How can sustainability drive better?
How can sustainability not just reduce the negatives,
but increase the positives and engage your consumers
your customers in that to help you to be
a more successful publisher, printer or whatever your business is?
And then once you got that
you obviously have some things in sustainability which are not profitable.
Well, how could you turn them in a different way to make them
more profitable?
And there's many, many examples which we could go through in how to do that.
Or, an example in terms of the unprofitable
but how could you make them profitable?
So they're profitable, but they're unsustainable.
So how could you make them more sustainable?
So finding ways in terms of which you can increase the profit
and the sustainable impact of what you do.
And that's what we'll focus on at various stages during today.
So thinking about your business, thinking what can you do.
Think about how can you create a better future for your business.
And for the world.
That's why we're here.