by Riva Krut
A new building insulation product reduces the heating bill of the average home by 13% and reduces CO2 emissions by an average of 15 tons per home. It generated over $3 million in new revenues for its producer, in 2004.
A Microcircuit Materials business unit, based in the US and China, made silver coating for ceramic filters used in cell phones. Their sole customer notified them that, due to strong price competition and dwindling margins, they were terminating the contract and would be converting to a new and cheaper process. In response, the business unit developed a new process that produced an improved product that would, by 2005, be cadmium-free. It also reduced the customer’s manufacturing costs by 40% without requiring any capital outlay. They prevailed and kept the contract. Apart from the environmental upsides, the contract was worth $4.4 million in annual revenues.
These two examples are from the same company, DuPont. TyvekReflex is the world’s first insulating breather membrane and has been developed in Luxembourg and the U.K.; the novel approach to product development came from DuPont Microcircuit Materials teams in North Carolina and Dongguan, China. These innovations are among twelve winners of the DuPont Sustainable Growth Excellence Awards 2005. The author of this article was among the judges for the Awards.
Innovation is not new to DuPont; it could be argued that it is a defining characteristic of the company. This century-old American company has brought us household name products and brands like Nylon, Orlon, cellophane, Kevlar and Tyvek. This ability to nurture innovation, decade after decade, is itself an accomplishment: what is new is that DuPont has now also taken up the concept of sustainable development as a business driver.
Under CEO Chad Holliday, DuPont’s vision is “to be the world’s most dynamic science company, creating sustainable solutions essential to a better, safer and healthier life for people everywhere; to make products that are clearer, cooler, drier, easier, further, faster, greener, easier, healthier, lighter, purer, safer, stretchier, longer, tougher.” How does DuPont plan to achieve continuous innovation and breakthrough science and sustainability, in a $27 billion company and 55,000 employees around the world? One way is to create competition among their best and brightest.
Each year, DuPont runs an internal competition for the most innovative project in Sustainable Growth. In order to be considered for this award, projects need to do more than achieve incremental change, they need to demonstrate business breakthrough, business success. The criteria in themselves are indicative of how DuPont directs energies: applications need to meet DuPont’s goals of zero injuries, waste or emissions; they need to reduce the use of non-renewable raw materials and energy. They need to be products or programs that increase knowledge intensity and decrease material intensity; they need to draw on integrated scientific and information technologies and add social value; and they need to work with stakeholders outside the normal supply chain, to create enhanced opportunities for business and social value.
As if all that is not enough, applicant projects have to pass a regional screen and graduate to the international and final round of judging. Some sixty projects made it. In order to judge them appropriately, DuPont imported ten of its own staff, ranging from experienced executives to newly hired graduates, from international locations. This was balanced with ten “external stakeholders”, from different geographies and with a range of environmental backgrounds and competences. Each of us had to evaluate all sixty applications before the meeting; each against seven criteria (like public impact, business impact, safety, health and environmental significance); and rate each criterion on a scale of 1 5. Our scores were sent in to DuPont and were used as a means to start our evaluation day with some accord on which set of applications rose to the top — or did not.
Of course, definitions are always subject to debate, and this was no different. What type of breakthrough was considered adequate to be a winner? There was a very lively debate, to some extent between American and European DuPonters, about whether a U.S.-based project – that halved dioxin use and projected a 90% reduction by 2007 – could be considered a winner, or whether the team should re-apply when they had eradicated the substance (dioxins are banned in Europe). The Europeans prevailed.
But cultural and national differences aside, one of the driving themes of the day was the insistence that a winning project had to show breakthrough, and not just incremental, change. Time and time again, when waste was reduced 50% in Puerto Rico, or groundwater use reduced 75% in Florida, an external stakeholder would be impressed. In contrast, DuPonters young and old would shrug off the achievement as: “this is what we are supposed to be doing anyway.”
There were also energetic exchanges between DuPont and external NGO adjudicators, about the very definition of sustainable growth. DuPont’s concept is wedded to technological solutions to global problems such as food production. Science is viewed as a crucial enabler. Chad Holliday asserts, for example, that biotechnology will allow us to double the amount of food and fiber produced, on the same amount of land presently used. The question for outsiders is whether this supposed “miracle of science” (the statement is part of DuPont’s logo), such as its genetically modified corn, could potentially become tomorrow’s nightmare.
The judges did not all agree with DuPont’s solutions, but we did feel that they are asking the right questions. The process of adjudication of their Sustainable Growth Excellence Awards also shows an interest in transparency. DuPont is engaging in issues that we all need to grapple with. They are looking at global issues that affect us all: the need to maintain access to food, water, shelter and economic life. They are forging synergies between economic, social and environmental needs; they are forcing forward the boundaries of science and society; they are engaging some of the best and brightest brains in industry to seek creative solutions to these issues; and they are building a successful business out of the result.
The dozen winners of the 2005 Sustainable Growth Excellence Awards on June 15 are indicative of the learning organization that DuPont has built: the ability to be innovative and to build breakthrough business. By any test, all these applicants were winners.
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Riva Krut, Ph.D., is a VP with Cameron-Cole and was one of the External Judges in the 2005 Sustainable Growth Excellence Selection Committee. Contact her: rkrut@cameron-cole.com
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