Q&A: Miriam Turner on collaborative innovation
Miriam Turner has just joined Friends of the Earth as Director of Disruptive Innovation, after 12 years working on collaborative innovation projects at Interface, a leading sustainable carpet tile manufacturer and purposeful business pioneer.
This included the ground-breaking Net-Works programme, which allows low-income coastal communities in the developing world to collect and sell discarded fishing nets for recycling into carpet tile. The programme thus provides communities with supplementary income while keeping their beaches clean, all while providing Interface with a new stream of recyclable material for its carpet tiles.
We spoke to Miriam about her experiences developing the Net-Works project and how purposeful businesses can embrace collaboration to innovate more effectively.
Q. First of all, what is collaborative innovation?
Collaborative innovation is about recognising that innovation is best done together. It’s all about getting different parts of the ecosystem together in the room to see what you can achieve together, even if you are not from the same sector, don’t have the same expertise or speak the same language. I call it working with “the unusual suspects”.
Q. How do you bring “the unusual suspects” together?
By asking an interesting question! The question Interface initially posed was: how could a carpet tile address inequality? That was the focal question that drew in people from different parts of the materials and fisheries ecosystem, leading to the development of Net-Works as a collaboration between Interface and ZSL.
We were already using recycled fishing nets as a material for carpet tiles, but had started to work internally on the idea that Interface’s supply chain could benefit fishing communities by allowing them to collect and trade used fishing nets.
To achieve this, though, we knew that it would take a number of different people to put the whole jigsaw together. The missing piece in the puzzle was people with the expertise in conservation, fisheries, fisheries management, community engagement, livelihood diversification, access to finance, that whole realm.
So we asked the question in the form of a workshop, which attracted people from the World Bank, social enterprises in India, academics and others, all giving different perspectives on the problem.
Q. Interface already has a reputation and a track record for having a very bold purpose around reducing impact. Did that open doors or generate early trust among partners going into this?
It’s extremely helpful if you have senior buy-in and cultural acceptance that the company exists for more than just financial performance. We were surprised by how many of the people we invited to the initial workshops already knew about Interface’s story, so that certainly helped with trust building.
Q. What was the output from that workshop?
Net-Works was one of three prototype models that was trialled as a result of that workshop. Dr Nick Hill of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) was one of the participants at the workshop, and had a background in sustainable livelihood in fishing communities in the Philippines.
He already had a very deep understanding of how income diversification at community level has a knock-on effect on fishing pressure and different ways of engaging communities. He also had an existing relationship with a wonderful set of people in the Philippines who were keen to turn this idea into a reality and who have been instrumental in its success.
Q. How did you come to select ZSL as your partners?
After a trial period it became clear that the prototype we were running in the Philippines with ZSL had the most potential to become commercially viable.
That was our intention from the start: it was never about doing a one-off beach clean-up. We wanted to re-engineer the value chain so that the project would stand on its own two feet, that is, the revenue from the nets would fund the on-going operations of the community-based supply chain.
Q. What are the challenges that come with innovating collaboratively, as opposed to developing new products within your own four walls?
It’s very important to be totally clear and respectful of what the individual organisational objectives are and what the shared partnership objectives are.
ZSL wanted to reduce donor dependency for their conservation work by setting up a conservation project that was financially sustainable in the long-term. At Interface, we wanted a product that was differentiated in the market by its robust social impact.
So when it came to reporting, for example, we would have different priorities and expectations about how and when impact data was generated, given that one partner is a commercial organisation and one is a scientific non-profit.
As the partnership broker, I had to make sure that I could represent the objectives of each separate organisation, acting as a kind of translator or filter. It could be challenging at times, but the result was a genuine co-creation where we worked together on something neither organisation could have achieved on its own.
Figuring out what to do at the end of a successful pilot is another challenge with collaborative innovation: who takes it on, who funds it, where does it go? Sometimes both the corporate and the NGO will expect the other to fund the scaling of a successful pilot.
Q. What has been the commercial benefit for Interface?
We surveyed our sales force and found that the project has had a measurable material impact on their ability to close deals. And they were very pleased with having a truly differentiated story that they could talk to their customers about with genuine pride — they even talk to their families about it.
It’s certainly a powerful story.
I think the human aspect of the story is what has made it so “sticky”. Not enough of the corporate conversation around the big challenges of our time is empowering, positive or people-based. This was about mothers and fathers and families who were empowered to have a materially better quality of life.
To give a small example, we turned up at the project one day and the community members were all wearing matching T-shirts. We just assumed that an NGO partner had made them, but it turned out the local people themselves had got them printed. I remember Nick getting emotional and saying, “you won’t appreciate what a big thing this is, but this is huge.”
The success of the project became an incredibly powerful sales tool, particularly in a commercial environment where more and more businesses are claiming to be purposeful, but don’t yet necessarily have the cultural embeddedness or the partnership and collaborative skills to make it happen.
Q. What steps do businesses have to take in order to successfully co-create and innovate from a place of purpose?
Dream big, but start somewhere! Ask the Interesting Question. Get the ‘unusual suspects’ in the room, and embrace the unexpected. It can be uncomfortable for people who’ve been through conventional business training, but it’s important to embrace the ambiguity and the unexpectedness that comes from bringing those unusual suspects together.
There’s also a deep level of empathy that’s needed to make any kind of partnership work. To be able to stand in somebody else’s shoes and genuinely hear them. To understand what their pressures are and to be really clear both about the shared objectives and about the parts where you don’t overlap. “I’ll be your translator, but I need you to be my translator.”
It’s easier said than done, and I’m by no means saying that we had the perfect templates and models, but having that in mind from the beginning I think is very important.
This article originally appeared in the Spring 2017 print issue of Purpose. For more on creative leadership, problem solving and purposeful business, please visit thehouse.co.uk or get in touch at hello@thehouse.co.uk.
