The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are an ambitious set, to say the least. But, statistics show that meeting these goals in just four out of the 60 sectors included could be worth $12 trillion a year in market opportunities. However, to get there, a lot of changes need to be made. Firstly we need to ditch the assumption that if we continue to do what we’re doing now but a little better or faster that we can achieve the goals set out before us by the UN.
In an attempt to support these goals Project Breakthrough has been created in a collaboration between Volans and PA Consulting and the United Nations Global Compact. In doing this, the team has developed a “Breakthrough Compass” in which to map emerging landscapes of opportunity and risk. The horizontal axis tracks the various outcomes created by business ranging from negative to positive while the vertical axis moves from incremental change to increasing exponential outcomes.
Rather than aiming just to simply reach the goals set out before us we should be trying to beat them tenfold. This is the basis of exponential thinking. Kevin Kelly is Wired magazine’s founding editor, and this is what he thinks about shifting to an exponential mindset:
While progress runs on exponential curves, our individual lives proceed in a linear fashion. We live day by day by day… Today will always be more valuable than some day in the future, in large part because we have no guarantee we’ll get that extra day. Ditto for civilizations. In linear time, the future is a loss. But because human minds and societies can improve things over time, and compound that improvement in virtuous circles, the future in this dimension is again. Therefore long-term thinking entails the confluence of the linear and the exponential.
Technology is central to an exponential mindset and sits at the heart of the evolving Project Breakthrough initiative. In Israel, for example, there is such a demand for water that as a result, the field of aeroponics evolved. This involves growing plants in air or mist opposed to using any soil or water and would solve a serious issue. One such company using this technique is now producing 50 times more plants per meter than ever before using 20 times less water.
Moving forward, business models will need to ensure they encompass emerging technologies while at the same time meeting the goals they’ve set out to do. “If you make a breakthrough in innovation, you cannot keep it to yourself,” says Patrick Thomas, CEO of Advanced materials company Covestro. “That’s very important. It’s a different way of thinking about how you make money. To keep it to yourself runs the risk that it would die. If you license it to everybody else, you guarantee that they change their view, they change their method of operation, and they adopt your technology. You’ve got to blow things open.”
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