Closing the Gap Between Producers and Consumers

• @3_GF

If we want to achieve a radical transition to more sustainable behaviour and lifestyles, both business and consumers need to be involved.  Innovation hubs create a learning and innovation environment for cross-industry exchange and for consumer-business interaction.

Hussain Hassan Mohamed Khansaheb of the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment in the UAE reaffirmed that in addition to entrepreneurial endeavours, government support is needed to catalyse innovations, exchange of ideas, partnerships, joint market research, and deepening understanding of the consumer.
For customers, it is important that the new sustainable lifestyles add to their quality of life as Jarl Krausing of CONCITO in Denmark underlined: “We need business and citizens to be part of this equation and therefore we are looking at the correlation between sustainability and happiness.”

Ligia Noronha from UNEP in Paris emphasised that people have to be excited about this change and that they could be included through co-creation. This also shows the role of global organisations that can connect initiatives to wider networks. Peter White of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) agreed with the importance of global collaboration: “making this a positive agenda where collaboration is essential, but not necessarily easy.”
Together with these and other organisations and companies like Safaricom and Velux, CSCP continues to work with CONCITO, EEA, 3GF and many of the other partners to develop the Innovation Hubs to further test and scale up the new business models ultimately spurring the transition to sustainable behavior and lifestyles globally.

Entrepreneurs can drive sustainable lifestyles. Bethlehem Alemu the founder of Sole Rebels in Ethiopia said: “100% of the material we are using is from local suppliers”. But she noted that it can be difficult to find financing from local banks to support her sustainable and ethical way of producing. Soledad Teixido from ProHumana in Chile, a Do Tank for sustainable business, noted the importance of the global conversation on changing to new business models where innovation, creativity, and disruption are important to come to what she called a “repairing economy”.

In 2015, CSCP launched a partnership initiative to create Innovation Hubs for new business models to scale up sustainable behaviour and lifestyles at the Global Green Growth Forum also known as 3GF. This has been set up as a public-private partnership to enable exchange and mutual learning between businesses and stakeholders. Local workshops have already started taking place in Brazil, China, Denmark, Germany and Kenya. In June 2016 at the 3GF meeting in Copenhagen, CSCP together with the European Environment Agency (EEA) and CONCITO organized a partnerships session on Business and Innovation for Sustainable Lifestyles.

During the partnerships session, companies and organisations from Africa, the Arab Region, Europe, and Latin America presented their experiences to an audience of people from business, government, and civil society. The presentations made it clear that business innovation for sustainability is already taking place but underlined that the creation of global and local regional hubs will strengthen the innovation, replication, and scaling up.