hello this module concerns environmental entrepreneurship and it's the last of the five fields of Entrepreneurship that we've discussed in this unit again adapting the definition that you've become used to pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control becomes pursuit of opportunity with an environmental sustainability Mission there are parallels with other forms of Entrepreneurship for example environmental entrepreneurship often involves the development of new technology think about solar panels um think about wind farms think about all these ways of um creating energy from renewable resources all of them involved technology also environmental sustainability is fundamentally a social issue the reason for becoming environmentally sustainable is um Collective benefit the benefit for society rather other than individual benefit so environmental entrepreneurship is is essentially a form of social entrepreneurship and therefore it has the same sort of challenges that social entrepreneurship faces such as a wider range of stakeholders one of the particular issues it shares with on with social entrepreneurship is that often the people who benefit from the impact of of environmental entrepreneurship are not necessarily those who pay for it there are big opportuni ities for corporate entrepreneurship in other words there is there are big benefits for established businesses to become involved in environmental sustainability if only for the purpose of their reputation but they are not taken up to any great or significant extent there's uh a paper which is included in the reading list um it's fairly academic but it has a useful model within it and and that's what I want you to focus on it creates a typology of ecopreneurs which is another way of saying environmental entrepreneurs that uh looks at two Dimensions first of all there's the degree of concern for sustainability versus economic Advantage so in other words is ecopreneurship driven by a desire for sustainability or is it by perceived economic advantage in other words if we take care of environmental sustain ability or at least appear to will it be better for the financial side of our business then there's what the paper calls soft versus hard structural influences so this really amounts to is it relationship based or is it economic or Market driven based that part is easier explained by providing some examples overall this leads to four types of ecopreneurs and they're shown on the next slide here's the four quadrant model and the paper has labeled them the ad hoc entrepreneur the Innovative opportunist the Visionary champion and the ethical M Maverick here are some examples of each of those the adhoc entrepreneur I've chosen a couple of local examples that are in that particular industry suggested in the article so other words um these are traditional um prod producers of um food in this case pork who have seen the opportunity to become more environmentally friendly so the ad hoc Enviro preneur um both of these are Victorian based Berry Bank pig farm is near to balarat uh pctt and pork is in the north of Victoria Berry Bank pig farm by the way is quite an interesting case study and worth having a look at but they use the um Pig slurry which is a great producer produc of methane they use it to generate electricity and they also um then use the waste product as fertilizer they consume some of the electricity on the farm itself and the fertilizer and they sell the Surplus and they're doing quite well out of it on the other side you've got the least um environmentally concerned sector so these are traditional businesses that are focused more on uh making a good profit so if you'll notice that the supermarkets CO's and Woolworths 10 years ago you wouldn't have found that many organic products on their supermarket shelves now they make a feature out of them Monique conetti is the founder of Flexar which has since been Sal to Herz at she describes herself as a serial ecopreneur but she's very business-minded she's looking way for ways of making profitable sustainable scalable businesses by providing solutions to environmental problem problems then you've got the Visionary Champion someone who can really see a way of doing things differently Anita rodic was one of the first of these with her body shop chain which was based on products that were not tested on an in animal on animals and the interesting thing about Body Shop is she managed to grow that business without any advertising when you think about it the Cosmetics industry is absolutely driven by advertising the whole of her business was scaled up based on Word of Mouth Ray Anderson appears on one of the Ted Talk links on the Blackboard site you could classify him as an example of corporate entrepreneurship as well his business is interface carpets carpets are carpet making is a very heavily fossil fuel-based industry and he set it as a company Mission to have zero environmental impact and 15 years later when he delivered that talk they had made a huge amount of progress and increased the profitability of the business which is something worth thinking about very well worthwhile looking at his talk Jim POS has been mentioned before in these lectures and he's a case study in the textbook entrepreneurship by by Graven zacharakis his first product development was the solar trash compactor and he was driven by a desire to um reduce environmental impact but he was very much focused on doing it as a sustainable for-profit business and then finally you've got the ethical Maverick who is more interested in the environmental impact in making a profit so for example some of you may have seen the lentle as anything um cafes around Melbourne I think there's about three of them one of them is at the abbottford convent Craft Center in lentil as anything you pay for what you think the meal was worth and people who can't afford to pay get to eat free it's also I think the cooking is done by people who are in long-term unemployed so it's giving them some um paid work as well Prince Charles who is the heir to the throne of the um United Kingdom has long had an interest in organic farming now he's lucky enough not to have to um worry about earning a living so he has been free to experiment on the land that he owns and it's been a condition of having tenant of being tenant Farmers that you pursue organic farming principles so he's made a situation where people can experiment with this without worrying about the viability of their own business because effectively he is underwriting risk very interesting stories there and it's been quite successful all of these links can be clicked through on the PDF copy of the slides here's some definitions of sustainability and what sust sustainability is fundamentally about is not depleting our supply of natural resources that in other words we shouldn't use them faster than we can replenish them there's a very widely accepted definition of environmental sustainability and it's this one it came out of um a United Nations commission uh commission and it's widely used because it captures the the sense of sustainability and it's simple to understand and it's personal sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs most of us even if we don't have children and don't intend to have children have a personal interest in future Generations if you're young the future generations of course includes a lot of your own generation so this is something I think that succeeds in conveying that this is not just um an external obscure matter that doesn't really concern us it actually affects every single person on the planet not to mention other species we talked early on in this unit about opportunities arising from problems and changes leading to both problems and solutions which in turn create opportunities if you apply that to environmental entrepreneurship things like climate change are big problems they're really difficult to handle and they are very widespread and interconnected and very hard to find solutions for so for those who can offer solutions that solve major environmental problems there are big opportunities big problem big opportunity more challenging but much more rewarding there's a a chapter again this is been provided on the readings on blackboard which looks at entrepreneurship through a sustainability lens um it's from an textbook on entrepreneurship and there are two sides to it first of all there's the perspective the sustainability lens involves looking at the whole whole system within the business so for example the total supply chain and if you look at the Ted Talk by Ray Anderson of interface carpets that's one of the things that he had to do immediately because his supply chain depended on fossil fuels essentially oil also other forms of non-renewable resources to provide the energy that drove his factories so that was a major part of the way that he sought to to make his his particular company more sustainable um there's also the idea of outward looking so rather than looking within your industry and within your mediate connections you look for what are called weak ties and weak ties doesn't mean that they don't have strength it just means that they are not um directly connected these are not people or organizations that you work with in your day-to-day business in the case of interface carpet again he had to look at other Industries and other um technology developments and other ways of managing Behavior change to actually achieve what he wanted to do in his business then there are tactics using the value added Network so as well as your weak ties you also use your strong ties who is in your direct Network and who can they lead you to and finally radical in incr mentalism that's just a way of saying one step at a time walk before you can run before you try to run uh if if you also remember the um the lecture on corporate entrepreneurship it talks about small winds so radical instrumentalism is an example of small winds your end goal is radical and challenging and a real stretch but your steps towards it are small and manageable and people can see that it starts to work here's uh an interesting graphic on waves of innovation and what has driven them you can look at the detail in your own time but what I'm focusing on here is the sixth wave which I've labeled knowledge but if you look at the things that are listed there they are all to do with environmental sustainability so that suggests that there are going to be a lot of opportunities in the future for businesses based on environmental sustainability there are Trends both in favor and against environmental entrepreneurship there is an increasing awareness of environmental damage this has been brought home to us in recent years by apparently increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters the cost of energy is rising there is concern about healthy living and there's a general interest in acting more sustainability however these are all long-term trends against that there are powerful vested interests who benefit from the way things are now in Australia the coal mining industry the um energy providers industry the origins and the um those are three major companies I forgot their their names that they have geared their whole business organization to the way things run at the moment maybe they should be thinking about having codak moment and moving towards different forms but anyway um there's consumer Behavior change often things that we value as consumers as convenient are not environmentally sustainable think of all the things that are packaged so that it's easy to put them on Supermarket shelves hang them up easy to have a solution in a box such as a prepared meal it's probably packaged in plastic um packaged in paper outside the plastic there's a lot of waste involved the costs of becoming more environmentally sustainable are immediate but the benefits are longer term and often what it offers is seen as having a lack of urgency if you remember we talked about the compelling need to buy by and painkillers vitamin and Candy Environmental Solutions are often seen as vitamins yes they're are nice to have but I don't really need them right now fear leads to denial because people don't um find it frightening to think of the possibilities of continued environmental degradation they would prefer to ignore it and then we're busy we're absorbed in in day-to-day life um we're working hard we're studying hard we're enjoying our leisure time and it's kind of too hard to deal with this stuff so there are powerful forces in both directions do the supporting Trends outweigh the adverse Trends I can't answer that but what I can say is that entrepreneurs are optimists and environmental entrepreneurs focus on the supporting Trends and believe that if they provide solution solutions they can overcome the adverse Trends here is a thought provoker it's getting on for 10 years old now and it's very American but it's also very well organized and very powerful and basically it asks us to question the cycle of production the graphics represent on the left hand side um the natural resources here we've got the industrial that turn them into finished products here we have retail which sells the finished products to the customers um who then use them and then they dispose of them above them we have the government who is coordinating activities and the big figure next to the government represents big corporations and big business and that just reflects the reality that um our biggest businesses today are bigger than many countries in the world in terms of um their their actual dollar value so there's a bit more to this picture this shows the accepted translation of raw materials into finished products which eventually disposed of what it doesn't show are the adverse impacts along the way such as extraction involves destruction of habitat local communities production pollution use of scarce resources such as energy and water distribution there's a huge amount of energy goes into distribution both transport and if you think about Heating and Cooling in supermarkets um consumption here's an interesting statistic and it would be interesting to know how much it's changed since this video was first made but the average lifespan of non-p perishable products so not foods and things that would naturally run out is six months we buy something we use it for six months we throw it away and then of course we don't dispose of it particularly efficiently either so we create a lot of litter pollution if you think about nature nature doesn't do this every waste product in nature is a raw material for another part of nature that's pretty smart we're not that smart I want to draw your attention as the video does to this particular Arrow here which is called the Golden Arrow and Annie Lennox who no it's not Annie Lennox Annie who created this video calls this the Golden Arrow of consumption so we are encouraged to think that our contribution to the economy should be to buy as much stuff as possible almost to the extent that if you don't have stuff if you don't have things you can be made to feel almost a bit guilty for not contributing enough to this Golden Arrow when I watched the video for the first time I was really struck by that because I was conscious of having felt that guilt and at the same time thinking I shouldn't really feel guilty about that why should I buy stuff that I don't need which is damaging to the environment but at the same time I feel guilty so it's pretty powerful raises a lot of thought-provoking questions well worth watch for further exploration and the links are available in the clickthrough PDF there's the global footprint Network which is measures Humanity's impact on the Earth's natural systems associated with that there is an organization that calculates Earth overshoot Day and that's based on the N the amount of resources we consume as a planet within 12 months versus the um amount that that can be regenerated within 12 months Earth overshoot Day is currently occurring in August so that's less than 2third of the way through the year you can also calculate your personal footprint how many earths would we need if every human being had your lifestyle mine requires 2.1 Earths food is the biggest contributor and by Australian standards that's quite small the only reason that Earth overshoot Day doesn't occur in the first third of the year is that because the majority of the world's population are in developing C countries which have much poorer and less resource intensive Lifestyles than we do I encourage you to explore the links takeaways from this session environmental entrepreneurship is a form of social entrepreneurship but it also often involves technology ology there are very powerful factors both in support of and against environmental entrepreneurship and for any particular Venture it will be important to weigh up what those factors are and determine whether you can overcome the factors against environmental entrepreneurship and make use of the factors in its favor the problems that environmental entrepreneurship seeks to solve are very widespread they're major and their complex what are often referred to as wicked problems because so many factors are involved in in contributing to those problems but the upside of this is that it leads to enormous opportunities for people who can develop Solutions not to mention enormously positive impact and if that's what you're involved in um environmental entrepreneurship for then that's also extremely rewarding so yes if it's um it's challenging and one of the challenges is that you often have to educate your customers to behave differently so overall it's challenging but it's also rewarding both personally and financially very fascinating topic and lots of lots of food for thought please engage with the readings and the um online activities to understand more about this fascinating field of entrepreneurship