Business Can Help
In the book “Can Business Save the Earth” written by Michael Lenox and Aaron Chatterji, they discuss how business, and more generally innovation and entrepreneurship, can help in reducing the damage done to our planet. This may seem a bit ironic because much of the harm that has been done to our planet was caused by big business. But the authors argue that business may actually be the best way to save it. One passage stuck out to me when reading this book. When discussing innovation, they describe it as a process of trial and error, and use the example of the song “Hallelujah”. This stuck out to me because Jeff Buckley’s version of hallelujah is my all-time favorite song. The original version of the song was written by Leonard Cohen, but he performed and re-recorded multiple versions. The song went through some more alterations before Jeff Buckley released his version, which was released and eventually went viral. This story is meant to show how innovation needs time and alteration to reach more ideal states. You can also look at this as innovation never reaches a final state, meaning you can always improve on an idea. It is easy to see how this idea translates to business, but how does this translate to the grand idea of ‘saving the world’?
Lennox and Chatterji write in their book “It is important to recognize that it is not obvious that society will naturally gravitate to the “best” technology. There are likely technologies that could yield tremendous sustainability benefits that are not being leveraged today because an incumbent technology is the dominant design”. One example of this that immediately comes to mind is the automotive industry. For years gas engines have been the dominant design for cars even though electric vehicles perform just as well. There is even a story about how the reason gas cars are preferred over electric is that in the early 20th century, a race occurred between a gas car and an electric car, but the driver of the electric car had gotten drunk the night before, so he lost the race due to not being in peak racing condition. It was said that after this race word got around that the gas car was better than the electric, and this spiraled into the total domination of gas cars in the automotive market.
When we consider that some technologies may only be in use due to them being first, we can see how this may help change the planet. Electric cars are beginning to take off all over the world with companies like Tesla performing exceptionally well, and you can only imagine how many other destructive technologies could be replaced with something better. Innovators should try to focus on some of the technologies that are harmful to the earth and really try to improve it, rather than building a replacement that may or may not even succeed. Sometimes all it takes is building off other ideas and you can wind up with something that changes the world.
