Takeaways from Climate Week To Design for a More Sustainable Future
By Ratish Namboothiry | Director, Innovation for Good & Sustainability at Kohler Co.
Originally published on LinkedIn
Coming back from a few days in NY for UNGA and Cimate Week, I had an opportunity to be on an insightful panel called "How to Design a More Sustainable Future" with industry experts: Martine Stillman, Niki King, Dalen Copeland and Eric Cohen. The momentum around integrating sustainability into design was incredibly inspiring. Here are my top two learnings:
- Cross-sector partnerships are critical to implementing environmental innovations at Scale: Taking a page out of the EV industry, we need to push for more collaboration across all sectors to drive change. We need governments to strengthen policies and provide incentives, manufactures to offer more environmentally products across multiple prices points, trade channels to influence consumers to buy these products and consumers to be motivated to change their behavior.
- Environmental considerations should start at product inception: While not easy to do, integrating environmental considerations into product development and operations decisions from the beginning is the most impactful way to bring more environmentally friendly products and services to the market. At Kohler, we use Design for Environment methodology to understand the environmental impacts of the products we are designing while still offering gracious experiences to end users.
I’m more convinced than ever that we have a diminishing window of time to address the water and climate crisis, but it cannot happen without a new level of cooperation across stakeholders in the climate and water sectors to push innovation. Kohler is up to the challenge!
To learn more about Kohler's commitment towards a Better Planet, visit https://www.kohlercompany.com/social-impact/believing-in-better/
About the author
Ratish’s passion lies in the innovation and implementation of sustainable business solutions to address the UN-Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Ratish leads Kohler’s Innovation for Good, the company’s internal incubator focused on developing and implementing new business solutions that have a social purpose. Ratish is also responsible for leading enterprise level sustainability strategy and performance.
