Greenbiz.com article on why change makers need iconic branding featuring Blue Earth Network.
Interview with Udaiyan Jatar on how small entrepreneurs created iconic brands like Apple, Coca-Cola and Nike!
The restaurant industry strongly influences or directly impacts some of the biggest issues in American society including obesity and poverty. The obesity issue is being tackled from a variety of angles, including legislation that seeks greater transparency in labeling of calories and ingredients and re-drawing of the Food Pyramid by folks like Dr. Walter Willett from the Harvard School of Public Health.
The poverty issue, on the other hand, is far more insidious. The minimum wage is less than 60-70%, at best, of a living wage. Add to this the widespread practice in some sections of the restaurant industry of not hiring workers for 40 hours or more to avoid paying benefits, forces the poor to take multiple jobs, stay away longer from home, and still not have any health coverage etc. This leaves no time for self-improvement via education, or indeed, not even a decent family life creating other long term social issues.
On the other end of the spectrum are restaurants like the ones listed on NP Enterprises Forum’s website – a link to social enterprises that provide great food while being socially and/or environmentally responsible.
TRANSFORMATIVE INNOVATION, PART II: DISCOVERY OF ROOT CAUSES
By Udaiyan Jatar
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”—Marcel Proust
Mental Paradigms and the Dangers of Experience
If you had an intractable problem to solve, who would you turn to—an expert or an inexperienced outsider? In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey described an experiment where two groups of people were shown a trick picture. One group was convinced the lady in the picture was a pretty young girl. The other group angrily argued it was an ugly old woman! The conclusions they drew were distorted by two different pictures the two groups had experienced before they were shown the trick picture. Unfortunately, our prior experience (often touted as expertise) constrains us every day, making us unable to see with new eyes. The key to innovation starts with identifying and eliminating barriers created by our expert judgment, so that we can spot transformational opportunities hidden in plain sight.
David vs. Goliath and Transformational Discoveries
Inventors involved in some of the world’s greatest discoveries, such as penicillin, have admitted to their accidental and unexpected nature. Remarkably, most world-changing discoveries were made by outsiders. For example, Einstein more »»
Transformative Innovation
We’ve all heard that we will need more Earths if we cannot curb population growth, reduce per capita consumption, or get more from less. We will need to do all three, but “getting more from less” is what this series of articles is about.
The story is the same at the micro level. Our organizations have fewer resources than are needed to meet the growing needs of our stakeholders (communities, donors, shareholders, employees, and so on). We cannot achieve our expanding goals with declining budgets by doing what we have always done. To transform our outcomes, we must transform what we do and how we do it. As
the saying goes, doing the same thing over again and expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity!
I think we can agree that transformative innovation (TI) is necessary.
An example of incremental innovation is moving from rotary dial to touch-tone phones. This innovation improved productivity incrementally. However, cellular phones are transformational. You don’t have to walk miles to an emergency phone if you are stranded on a highway. If you are a farmer in a remote village, you can access a world of information from a more »»