Sustainable Design - How it works in India

Here's a lesson and advanced learning to all budding designers, architects and sustainability thinkers. How people in India, use their common sense to create the most practical and sustainable design for things that really matters.

Strangler Fig living bridges in Meghalaya, India from Christiaan on Vimeo.

Simplicity is next to godliness.

Soles with Souls - Great work Contract

Finally Contract Advertising India did something I'm proud off. They finally realised the potential of Green Initiative and where it can take their brands. JK Tyre's Soles with Souls is one such initiative. A project well done and worth mentioning at every global forum.

It is not just about recycling and meaningful recycling. Shoes made with waste tyres. Collaboration with the Footwear Design and Development Institute of India, young footwear designers and creating objects of desire from scrap tyres. Amazing.

All the best guys.

Crowdsourcing for disease surveillance

Using the internet to predict and prevent epidemics in developing countries? Wow. This is indeed Doing Good. Using technology and innovative research for genuine betterment of people. Research has shown that what people search for and say online can reflect and even predict outbreaks. Now we know internet subscribers and users in India will grow to more than 240 million by the end of 2012. Can we extend the reach of internet and technology to stay ahead of infectious diseases?

Can we see Ranbaxy, Dr. Reddy's, Astra Zeneca, Sanofi Aventis playing a lead role in collaboration with Google, Microsoft Bing etc along with the WHO, UN and local govt. It will indeed be a breakthrough development in countries like our Indian Sub-continent and the Sub Saharan Africa.

Making money from doing good.

I really like and believe in what Mr. Noam Kostucki (Co-founder of Seeducation) says at TEDx. It only reinforces my belief that the sole purpose of making profit is for doing good. Period. Exactly the same point I mentioned in my ATTICUS paper.

Well, watch out. Companies who still don't realize this simple fact is bound to have larger problems later. Do Good or Die.

Nestle Head Emphasizes Profiting from Doing Good

Further to my ATTICUS 2010 paper called "Do Good or Die," here's an interesting article on how Nestle is emphasizing on making profits from doing good.

Chief executives should not use shareholders' money for philanthropy, says Nestle Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, who instead focuses the world's biggest food maker on making money by doing good. The growing corporate trend has been dubbed "creating shared value" and Nestle now publishes an annual progress report on goals such as increasing the nutritional value of products and reducing its use of water and quantity of greenhouse gas emissions.

Brabeck spoke about the concept at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Tuesday. He said Nestle concentrates its efforts on rural development, water and nutrition. "Creating shared value has a big attractiveness because it really takes into consideration the interests of both sides (business and society)," Brabeck told Reuters on Tuesday. "We have integrated this now into the purpose of our company.

"Philanthropy basically is doing good for no other reason that doing good," he said. "This you can do with your own money but I don't think you can use the money of your shareholders to do philanthropy, to do good."

Brabeck said creating shared value certainly had its challenges, such as dealing with issues like deforestation and child labor, a problem that Nestle was trying to address by providing education for the children. "If they have the access to good schooling, then the child labor as such if it is helping the fathers in the field and helping with the harvesting, I don't think this is a problem," he said. "The problem is when you use the children only for that and don't allow them to go to school."

Charitable contributions by corporations were valued at $14.1 billion in 2009, according to a Giving USA Foundation report researched by The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. Two-thirds was cash and in-kind contributions from company budgets and the rest grants by corporate foundations.

Five years ago Brabeck said he stunned global and business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos when he declared that corporations did not need to give back because they had not stolen anything from the world. "I was just shocked that in a very short period everybody started to say, 'Yes, I agree we have to give back to society,' and I was thinking, 'Well, we're creating value for society,'" he said. "If you have to give back it means you have taken something that doesn't belong to you."

Since then Nestle has established a Creating Shared Value Advisory Board, which includes Michael Porter of the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School, who is responsible for the creating share value concept. Brabeck said there are 600,000 small poor farmers around the world who work exclusively for Nestle and the company has helped them produce higher yields and quality, increase their income, reduce their environmental impact and boost Nestle's reliable supply of good coffee.

Most of Nestle's 443 factories are in rural areas and more than half are in poor countries. Nestle said it was working to provide skills training, clean drinking water for communities, literacy and numeracy programs, and infrastructure, among other things.

"It was always difficult to justify the spending of an important amount of money when you had this old concept of corporate social responsibility," he said. "Should the company get into a nonprofit situation and do it as a business purpose? I don't think my shareholders have given me money to do this."

DO GOOD OR DIE

This is my second attempt at writing another ATTICUS paper. Do Good or Die is an attempt at understanding the paradigm shift from branding to service. The shift from making profits to being ethical and doing good to society and people. This paper explores how Return on Investment is making way for Return on Involvement. How Social Media and Social Responsibility is changing the way brands are marketed and its future impact on Earth and people living on the planet. How Social Media and Social Responsibility will help brands become more acceptable to people and society. It also explains how Sustainability will become the core focus of brand marketing in an era of increased globalization.

Do Good or Die

View more presentations from Roop Mukhopadhyay.

Considered Design - The Next Wave

In the beginning of 2010, when I was writing my thesis paper on Sustainability and intelligent ways of using resources, how it is becoming the most important and critical factor is developing a global brand, seldom did I know that Nike was actively creating a Considered Index Calculator as part of their Environmental Apparel Design Tool. You should also check out their Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability report, one of the best data visualization report I've come across.

I was so happy to find out that Nike is playing a leadership role in this area and together with brands like Patagonia, Adidas, Espirit, Levi Strauss, JC Penny, Walmart, H&M, M&S, Target, Timberland along with Outdoor Industry Association, Duke University, Environmental Defense Fund and US Environmental Protection Agency and many others in creating the first Sustainable Apparel Coalition. The new Sustainable Apparel Coalition will establish a common index setting industry wide benchmarks for ecological credentials of clothing and footwear.

Am sure we'll see more companies, universities and govt. bodies coming together from across industries to create coalition indexes and benchmarks together. Personally I think in India, the telecom giants should come together to create an Index that delivers meaningful Value Added Service. I also think all the Life Insurance companies in India should come together to create a Claim Transparency Index. Its seems like a great proposal but the later is highly impossible given banking and transparency don't go together. But when you give it a serious thought, you will see, how deeply it can impact the lives of our people.

Do share your thoughts and comments.

Social health and free condom apps

Well things like this happens. But not in India. You don't need smartphones. You just to send a text message to people. You can even segment those people for precise targeting etc. Drivers, construction workers etc. Condom brands in India don't think this way nor does the govt. health dept or local municipal bodies. The telecom companies don't say anything either. But honestly so much good could be done, if only brand managers cared about doing good. I mean the other two P's apart from Profit while our Govt. stays busy cleaning its own mess from the scam.

Social health is a high potential, growth segment for the next few years. Imagine a future when Social Health + Mobile Health join hand to create an unique platform in India. Imagine if the Dept of Health + Hospitals + Pharma Companies + Health Insurances + University Research Dept come together? Imagine creating a (RED) equivalent using different platforms and technologies to do good REAL, TANGIBLE GOOD for poor people? Joining hands to eradicate poverty and illness from India. Doing what the Govt. is failing to do. Well, only if they really want to make any meaningful contribution other than making profits. Ha. Only if the marketing teams in India, understood how to approach the concept of doing good.

Good times indeed

The wave of change has hit the MENA nationals hard. What an amazing time. People power at its best. But I didn't know John R. Bradley, author of Inside Egypt (2008) predicted long ago, a social revolution is about to happen in that region. I haven't read the book yet so I cant say much but it makes me wonder, planners should have the ability to predict changes with precise timelines too. Over throwing regimes vs. over throwing market leader. It's all about the marketplace end of the day. Ability to predict doesn't mean writing trend reports, ability to predict means doing/ implementing tangible social experiments to judge the socio-cultural undercurrents. From precise prediction to visible ripples in the market. Then comes the strike rate of correct prediction.

Makes me ask so many questions about the changes we're going through. People actually haven't come to terms with the chain of events happening around us. Will the MENA/ GCC region create its own currency now? Will GCC truly become an effective Union? Wonder what role will Iran play? What about Turkey and Saudi Arabia? What will be Israel's role in the whole game plan? OMG... things are quiet fucked up.

Ha. Planning is fun.