Sustainability — A Toolkit for the Future
A Design Thinking workshop with students from the Ludwigshafen University of Business and Society at the SAP AppHaus Heidelberg
“Be the change that you wish to see in the world,” is one of the more famous Gandhi quotes. But how? Especially when the everyday grey slog has got you in its firm grip and the injustices of the world seem to repeat themselves endlessly, this notion seems to get an increasingly sarcastic undertone. “Are you serious? I can’t do anything. I’m just a small cog in a wheel!” Wouldn’t it be great if someone had counteracted this notion during your formatting years? If you had discovered in a simple but effective way that this wasn’t true?
Ludwigshafen University did just that. On December 8, students of “International Business Administration” and “International Business Administration and Information Technology” took part in a workshop at the SAP AppHaus Heidelberg.
The concept: simple but not simplifying
With this workshop, Regina Raschke, Professor of Marketing and Human Resources at the Ludwigshafen University of Business and Society, mainly wanted to introduce the students to Design Thinking in a practical way. Another aim was to sensitize them for sustainable topics and show them what you can achieve with easy steps, and in what way the method of Design Thinking can be used for finding solutions to such challenges.
With the Purpose and Sustainability Exploration Workshop format that the SAP AppHaus specially developed for such sustainability topics, the complex topic can be approached in a structured and intuitive way. With its series of carefully constructed steps, it becomes accessible without simplifying anything. This is achieved by slowly but surely zooming into the topic and then also zooming out again to look at factors beyond the institution itself.
This way of exploring new approaches is part of SAP’s Human-Centered Approach to Innovation. Starting out with Design Thinking, it combines various methods to discover what is truly needed. These tools and methods are made available in the Innovation Toolkit.
The workshop — innovation from a human(e) perspective
After a brief introduction, the students were divided into four groups, each addressing one specific sustainability challenge:
- Zero Emissions: “Manage carbon emissions across all scopes”
- Zero Waste: “Eliminate waste and pollution”
- Zero Inequality: “Respect people — diversity, safety, and human rights”
- Steering and Reporting: “Benefit people and planet by leveraging the power of purchasing”
As an SAP AppHaus Fellow, I had the pleasure to not only witness the workshop, but to actually take part in it and join a team. That way, I could experience first-hand all the advantages of this approach. I became part of the Steering and Reporting team and the following will be a recount of the working process that made it possible for us to successfully tackle a complicated problem in a very short amount of time in a very playful manner.
Having arrived at our workstations, we started with the first phase — identifying the focus challenge.
For this, we were asked to write down any unresolved issue concerning our topic that we could think of. All within the context of sustainability and Ludwigshafen University. When bringing the ideas together, several clusters became apparent:
- Power supply: water, gas, electricity
- Buildings: rent and maintenance
- Furniture: tables, chairs, whiteboards, office materials
- Staff: cleaning, guest professors, regular professors, staff on limited contracts
- Public transport: student travel cards
- Technical equipment and IT: computers, beamers, servers, online lectures, computer programs used
- Canteen: meals and drinks, vending machines
Now a big decision had to be made: which of these topics should the group focus on? We felt that both as regards knowledge and feasibility, the canteen would be the best choice.
We brainstormed solutions for the previously mentioned problems related to food at the university. Thinking of solutions already shows one of the strengths of Design Thinking, as it helps you shift from problem to solution mode automatically. Re-clustering these solutions makes this shift complete. In a next step, we put these clusters on a feasibility scale from impossible to easy and from high to low impact. It was surprising that there was little discussion about where the different topics should go on the whiteboard.
This approach helped us think outside the box in many ways, for example:
- Transparency was identified as a vital point: a menu listing all ingredients, nutritional values, and ways of preparation; indicating local produce, supply chains, and animal welfare.
- Software could help identify local farmers to buy produce from and also help with the logistics. Furthermore, it could indicate the season for each crop. And it could help keep the costs down.
- With a diverse and healthy menu, Ludwigshafen University would be an example to others. The concept could be spread via social media. Co-operations with other universities could also spread it.
- Habits are powerful, that is why incentives are a powerful instrument to counter them: for instance, by handing out snacks, promoting vegan food or making vegetarian food cheaper than the meat-option.
You will notice that one column in the picture is missing: the menu. The solutions we found for this topic are integrated on the next canvas.
The next step would catapult us out into the big wide open again. The task now was to identify the solutions needed outside the university to solve the problems. These were divided into environmental, social, economic, technological, political, and cultural factors. The solutions found previously were sorted into this new grid and new ones added.
First though, the focus lay on delineating the problems in each of the categories:
- Environmental problems: food import, long delivery routes, meat consumption and CO2 production, poor quality of livestock farming, the packaging of products.
- Social problems: prejudices towards veganism, needs of exchange students not being considered, farmers in developing countries exploited, the difficulty of changing habits, no surveys on what kind of food students actually want.
- Economic problems: meat cheaper than healthy alternatives, local food more expensive, no local suppliers.
- Technological problems: no feedback, no transparency (see above), no needs assessment.
- Political problems: meat industry subsidized, plant-based lifestyle not subsidized, factory farming still allowed, price dumping of farming products such as milk.
- Cultural problems: prejudices/bias towards anything new, few international dishes on offer, cooks don’t know how to prepare them, dishes accommodating all religions are missing.
We picked the two areas of technological and cultural problems to focus on and provide solutions for. It was felt that there were enough members in the group with technical expertise that could help the canteen create more transparency by developing a special program for them. It was also decided that the first step to resolve the cultural issues should be a conversation with the kitchen management to see how a new concept could be implemented.
The outcome
Within as little as two hours we had developed a sustainability concept for the Ludwigshafen University canteen menu. Its aim was to tackle the problem that it was not “all inclusive”, as regards religious and cultural differences, ignoring local produce, and ethical principles.
The solutions were as follows:
- Create a weekly vegetarian-only day
- Offer vegan options as well
- Make vegetarian/vegan food attractive
- Introduce international food weeks
- Collect feedback regularly
- List food ingredients
The main advantages of these solutions would be sustainability and inclusion, transparency, as well as food diversity. The university would get healthier students. Also, it would be supported by small local businesses and with that a role model for others. It would also fulfill its educational mission.
The other teams had been busy, too, and all ideas were met with great applause. In the feedback session it became very clear that the students enjoyed their SAP AppHaus experience tremendously.
So, what do you need to change something? After this workshop, the answer is simple: A room, some people (as diverse as possible), a whiteboard, and a method. And, if you lack the first three, just the latter will do. As the SAP AppHaus says, people, processes, and places are three out of five enablers of innovation. Perhaps you’re just a small cog in the wheel, but they matter as much as the big ones.
