Just before the summer break I had the honour of presenting six key policy recommendations on Sustainable Innovation to the Italian Parliament, distilled from CASI, an EC-funded project I’m managing on behalf of META.

So what is Sustainable Innovation (SI)? The project started by creating the following shared definition, throughout the EU and worldwide:

‘any incremental or radical change in the product, service, system, organisational, governance, social and marketing landscape that leads to positive environmental, economic and social transformation without compromising the needs and welfare of future generations’

Sustainable innovation, in other words, is the key to reconciling environmental protection and socio-economic growth.

Reconciling environmental protection and socio-economic growth

Given its audience, my presentation focused on how international institutions and policy makers can support Sustainable Innovation. In essence, this boils down to:

Encouraging civil society entities to assess the impact of sustainable innovation on society, and listening to their ideas, stories and recommendations

Acquiring a shared understanding of "best practices" related to sustainable innovation

Developing a common modus operandi for assessing and managing sustainable innovation

In terms of policies they should:

Remove barriers hindering SI

Remove barriers linked to both access to finance and regulation. Invest in supporting infrastructures, particularly those for entrepreneurship, new businesses, as well as other existing business programs.

Promote active collaboration among all actors

Sustainable innovation is based on co-creation, and transversely affects all sectors. This means we need to support collaboration between sectors, actors and civil society via new 'cross-fertilization' platforms.

These actors can be empowered through a focus on human resources and launching awareness-raising programs to improve the visibility of innovators, such as prizes and business plan competitions.

Adopt a broad definition of innovation

Reward projects that consider different types of innovation (product, service, organizational process, market, etc.) rather than just product / process innovations.

Support from research through to innovation

This means exploiting research results, prototyping, pilot experimentation and demonstration.

Reward "public" involvement in research

Civil society entities and representatives must be encouraged to participate and have their say in research projects, both in the defining the challenges and in validating the use of the research results.

Further reading

I was speaking at the Parliament on behalf of CASI partner META, which prepares CASI policy briefs on sustainable innovation and organizes citizen panels in Italy (more).

Apart from such innovation consultancy work, META also manages venture capital funds and provides entrepreneurial mentoring as part of its integrated Platform for supporting startups and helping governments, Institutions, regions and cities around the world foster more of them.