Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Elena Montrasio
When you start your PhD,
one of the hardest things is finding a question:
a research question we don't know enough about already
and that's interesting to explore,
and above all one that you yourself are interested in dedicating yourself to
all day long – sometimes all night long –
for years to come.
When I started my PhD in 2007,
it immediately downed on me
just studying how companies could improve their financial performance -
I started a PhD in economics and management –
was not enough for me.
I wanted to dedicate my hours, my days and my nights
to something more:
I wanted to save the world.
Yeah, well - I had major ambitions.
It took me over a year,
but I found the two keywords
I could build my research project around.
The first was innovation,
which means how businesses change what they do and what they produce,
and the way they do it.
And the second was environmental sustainability.
What does this mean?
Well, today there's no need to explain that.
At least not today, not to you.
But 10, 15 years ago I remember
that not many companies were aware
of what I was talking about.
And I remember going from factories to events
trying to explain why putting environmental sustainability
at the centre of innovation choices and new product development decisions
was such a critical, strategic choice for companies.
Nowadays, though, there's no event
where the words "green", "circular" and "sustainable"
don't appear in at least one of the event talks.
In fact, if we look at the numbers,
so much has been done in recent years
when it comes to sustainability.
Huge projects have been developed,
and almost all companies have started to get involved
with sustainability efforts.
For example, look at reducing greenhouse gases.
Well, in 2020,
of the 4,000 biggest companies in the world by revenue,
65% had detailed plans
on how they will reduce their emissions in the coming years.
This figure was just 50% until three years ago.
Great.
But if we go and look at greenhouse gas emissions themselves,
we see that we're still a way off hitting our targets.
And in fact, if we go and read the declarations made by companies,
and even if we focus only on G7 companies
and publicly listed ones,
namely those with the most resources,
well, we see that 75% of these targets
have been declared invalid.
They've been declared invalid not because they don't lead to change,
or because investments have been made and change hasn't been brought about,
but because those changes aren't what we need,
because those changes aren't what it takes
to reach that threshold of 1.5 degrees.
Let me give you an example to explain what I mean.
Are you familiar with tree planting initiatives
to offset CO2 emissions?
Well, if we really had to plant
all the trees that have been declared
in the various reports from companies and institutions,
well, they'd probably take a new planet to fit them all in.
So why?
Why, if there's a desire to change,
why, if there's investment in change,
why, if companies are doing things?
And yet the expected results aren't being achieved.
Why isn't changing that easy?
Why is it so difficult to achieve this result?
Not just reducing my impact,
not just polluting a little less than I did yesterday,
but actually reducing the environmental problem.
That's a much more complex matter.
Allow me to explain the complexity of sustainability to you,
starting with very everyday examples
and using a mantra we might all be familiar with:
the three R's.
And what I want to tell you
isn't so much that innovation and change aren't possible,
but that if we do so in a simplistic way,
sometimes we cause more problems than we solve.
Designing new products with recyclable materials –
well, that's sustainable, isn't it?
No, if we can't recycle that product afterwards.
Take the door of your washing machine.
Glass, plastic, aluminium.
All recyclable materials, right?
Yes, but I'd like to see you, when it stops working,
separating them and putting them in the right bins
and dividing up the raw materials.
Unless that product was designed from the outset
to be disassembled at the end of its life.
Reuse then - buying a second-hand product.
That's sustainable, right?
I avoid using virgin raw materials, I avoid creating waste.
Erm, not if using that product
creates more problems than it solves.
A study commissioned by Patagonia
compared the emissions of microplastics, microfibres in each wash,
comparing synthetic technical jackets designed 10, 20 years ago
with more recent ones.
They discovered that, with each wash,
jackets designed within the framework of the linear economy,
without thinking about the impacts at the end of their life,
leave behind 60% more microfibres, microplastics with each wash.
And a lot also depends on how we do that wash.
Reduce.
Being more efficient.
Increasing the efficiency of resources.
That must be sustainable, right?
No, not if this efficiency then leads
to an increased use of the very resource.
Take the air traffic sector.
In the last 70 years,
there have been incredible technological transformations
that stashed emissions per passenger to less than 20 fold.
However, during this period
there's also been an equally incredible increase
in passenger numbers,
partly driven by the fact
that the more affordable prices driven by these efficiencies
have made it easier to travel.
This increase in passenger numbers has more than made up for the savings,
and we have more than seven times more emissions today
than 70 years ago.
So you see, long story short, doing good isn't enough.
It's necessary, yes,
but it's not enough to really change things.
And if we approach sustainability in a simplistic way,
without really checking to see the impacts of the actions I take,
I risk creating more problems than I'm going to solve.
This is the complexity that businesses face.
But another layer of complexity is added to that.
Take a product you have in front of you now:
something you're wearing,
or maybe what you're using now to watch me and listen to me.
What you see is a single product, right?
You see a monolithic object.
Only one company name is written on it.
And yet, beneath the surface,
there's a jigsaw puzzle of components
made by a large number of different companies,
each of which specialises in a production phase
necessary to make that product,
and perhaps located in countries
with a different level of focus on sustainability,
different regulations, different societal pressures.
Take an iPhone, for example.
180 different components
made by an extensive network of suppliers
spanning from the United States to Japan,
from South Korea to Italy.
Or even a simpler product, like a shoe.
A woman's high-heeled shoe has more than 40 different components.
So you well understand,
if we want the entire product to be sustainable,
all the companies that are part of that jigsaw
need to have designed using sustainable materials,
they need to have focused on reducing the impacts of their production processes,
they need to have considered it from an end-of-life perspective,
trying to reduce the impacts when the product is no longer used.
And these actions need to be coordinated with one another,
or at least they need not to get in the way of one another.
What does this mean, not get in the way?
Let me explain by going back to that shoe,
which maybe you bought from the store of a French brand
made by a Romanian footwear manufacturer
whose leather was tanned in Italy
starting with hide from Brazil.
So, what does it mean to make that shoe sustainable?
Sustainability, if you ask the brand,
means selling a product made with sustainable raw materials,
for example, substances that don't contain heavy metals.
If you ask the tannery,
making sustainable leather means making leather
that does not generate impacts, especially with regard to water,
when it is produced.
What's the problem, you may think: they can do both.
Truth is, that if the brand asks the tannery
to make leather without heavy metals,
the tannery ends up completely changing the production process,
making leather that's not really durable.
And if you still want to have leather that's durable enough
to make a marketable product, one that can be sold,
you'll have to use more chemicals downhill in the production process.
So total emissions, at the end of the day...
Both of these participants have done so much,
they've changed their operations a lot.
But the two things have balanced each other out,
and in the end the impacts weren't necessarily reduced.
So you understand when sustainability complexity
meets global value chains' complexity,
sustainability complexity becomes squared complexity.
Because it's not enough just to verify
that the action has a result,
that it is actually the action that's needed to reduce impacts.
And look, that's not a given.
But I also need to make sure that my action is coordinated
with the actions of others.
So you're probably wondering,
how to deal with such complexity?
What can we do?
How do we choose to deal with this situation?
We could give up:
recycling, reusing, is already hard.
If I do it, and maybe doesn't have the expected results...
Or I could delegate the job of managing sustainability to others,
someone who can discover a new technology that will save us,
or politicians who have lots of possible choices,
or people who pollute more,
or people who are richer and have more resources.
Someone else, in any case.
Or I could give up,
because there are other priorities in my life, in the world today, right?
We could certainly deal with it like this,
choosing to address the complexity of sustainability in this way.
And 30 years from now, if we looked back,
no one could look at us
and say it was your fault, or your fault, or your fault
for the condition we're in.
No one could say that to us, it's true.
But think how different the future could be
if we all started to build a different future today,
if we chose to approach this complexity differently.
You might ask now,
How can we deal with such complexity?
Do you remember the research question?
The PhD question.
Well, that's exactly the question I asked myself.
How can a company truly reduce its impacts
if it's not even responsible
for all the activities that need to be changed?
And what I discovered -
I and my many colleagues who work in these fields -
can be useful not just for managers
grappling with their daily choices,
but also for you if you're a product designer,
or a consumer who wants to choose
between one product or another,
or simply a citizen
who's choosing how to spend their free time,
or a recent graduate choosing what to devote your career to.
What did I discover?
That problems get solved when they're not ignored.
When we don't look for simple answers to complex problems.
When we don't look for easy solutions
that ease our conscience
but don't ease environmental problems.
That in order to find effective solutions,
it's important that we all inform ourselves today,
that we start to try and understand a bit more
how we can really do things
to reduce environmental impacts.
And I've discovered, that problems are not limitations.
They're starting points.
And that sometimes even just by asking simple questions like,
"What is this product really needed for?"
Or "Do I really need this product?"
By asking questions as simple as this,
we can create incredible solutions.
And you don't always need big, really expensive technology.
Sometimes it's also much simpler things
that enable us to change the world and change things,
starting with asking ourselves the right questions.
Finally, the last strategy to deal with complexity
is the most important of them all,
the one that incorporates all the others:
collaboration.
Because if we don't perceive ourselves as part of a larger system,
we'll never solve our time's key environmental issues:
we never will, unless we seek out allies.
Others who share with us the same environmental issues.
Or people who might have the complementary resources
to help us solve them.
Or, lastly, someone we can join together with
to amplify our voice.
Because there's one thing, I've understood over the years:
No one can save the world alone.
But out there are companies, entrepreneurs, citizens,
associations, cooperatives -
There are so many who are doing extraordinary things.
So start looking for them.
Start today, look for those nearest to you
who can help you contribute in any way
to change things where you are.
No one saves the world on their own.
And sustainability - yes, it's difficult.
It's like climbing a mountain.
But now you too know the tools to climb it.
I'm convinced that if we use them
and if we all share the same rope,
then yes, 30 years from now,
looking ahead, we'll finally be able to see
the future we want.
(Applause)