How to accelerate sustainability & inclusion through a rapid innovation methodology

Daniel Chartier, Innovation Research Lead, Sustainability
Debra Slapak, Senior Director, Innovation Strategic Initiatives
Rita Stern, Product Designer Lead

The authors are grateful to the Iron Mountain Sustainability team, including Erin Gately, Jen Grimaudo and Sean Mangus.

This paper introduces an inclusive, research-driven rapid learn-and-pivot methodology to help CIOs, CTOs, and product development teams integrate sustainability and inclusion into their development processes.

Executive summary

Enterprise leaders are shifting their cultures and processes to take a longer-term view of what matters most: our people and our planet. A Gartner, Inc. survey ¹ of CEOs and senior executives finds that “For the first time ever, CEOs place environmental sustainability in their top 10 priorities.” After decades of refining strategies that drive growth and profitability–often with minimal focus on environmental sustainability–many organizations are discovering that stepping up efforts in this area pays big dividends. Among the potential benefits: Achieving their traditional objectives by attracting the best talent and more loyal customers, partners, and other stakeholders.

Such shifts are not easy. Just as the old ways of thinking no longer suffice, the old methods of generating innovation no longer deliver against the range of values that leaders, consumers, business partners, shareholders, and employees expect. /p>

How do you approach wide-scale change? Whether in small steps or large strides, organizations can retrofit existing products and practices and design new products and services with sustainable practices at their core. Here, we provide background on the challenges of achieving sustainability goals and propose a practical methodology for solving these challenges in an inclusive, stakeholder-centric, rapid-iteration approach.

Emphasis on “cycle”

Building sustainable products doesn’t mean altering the traditional product lifecycle, although it does shift the focus and layer in some complexity to accommodate sustainability. Every team involved in the solution lifecycle must consider more variables, factoring in the environmental and human impact of the offerings they’re developing.

Will the methods and materials they’re using lower their environmental footprint? Will their processes contribute to a circular economy in which materials and products stay in use as long as possible and then are broken down to be reused in new products or elsewhere?

Will their products and services accommodate different perspectives, values, capabilities, and needs? How will they get to those kinds of outcomes?

Two of the biggest challenges to building sustainable products and services are reducing the greenhouse gas emissions associated with their production and delivery and ensuring that they can recycle physical products into new products. Product design teams must reduce emissions and design physical products so that they become the source material for the latest version of their product or a new product altogether–or even some other organization’s product.

To understand how organizations can move forward more quickly to meet their sustainability goals, let’s look at the challenges in creating sustainable products and some emissions basics.

Existing products

When a product is in the market, product teams can’t just shut it down and redesign it so that it causes less pollution, debris, landfill, and so on. In this “existing products” scenario, product teams are churning out updates and have conflicts: Can the pricing model support the additional costs of decreasing the carbon footprint or designing a mostly plastic product to eliminate metal screws, for example? How much change can these teams make between shrinking product release cycles? How much change is enough? These challenges are compounded when leaders don’t consistently communicate why sustainability is critical and what the goals are over time.

Product teams may have executives saying, “We’re going to do what’s right and lower our emissions. Meanwhile, another says, “We have to hit the numbers this quarter!” which can translate to: “We need that update/new version now!”

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