Pivot Now for a Better 2040

Decarbonising Data and Strategies

NewTerritory’s Design Director, Tim, and Senior Creative Strategist, Guneet, attended Innovation Zero — an event showcasing advancements in decarbonising economies and societies. The big trend of the year was carbon data, as numerous companies developed software and data platforms to help businesses reduce their carbon footprint. This trend spanned diverse sectors, including travel, banking, space, architecture, and energy.

One notable launch was the 8 Rivers announcement of the 8RH2 CO2 Convective Reformer, a breakthrough technology for producing ultra-low carbon hydrogen from natural gas.

Disruptive Manufacturing

Manufacturing requires significant investment to become agile, particularly in terms of robotics, digital twins, and new factories. In comparison, SMEs and adjacent industries like fashion can build smarter or adapt faster due to their tighter product cycles.

Space Forge, a disruptive brand, aims to innovate in this industry and usher in the next industrial revolution. They have launched the world’s first returnable, reusable, and scalable factory, which can be tailored to off-planet manufacturing or innovative research. Their approach explores results that cannot be achieved on Earth, with benefits such as extreme temperature range, no contamination, and a natural vacuum. Applications range from improving superalloys, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals to developing next-generation computing.

Decentralising Innovation

The smart home sector had seen brands competing to enter the home promising automation, intuitiveness and delight — until this year at CES with Matter, a multi-brand collaboration launched a standard for smart technology to reduce complexity and compatibility restraints. At the show we can’t help but notice the same challenge with organisations developing their own strategies and not exchanging knowledge, learnings or failures, we expect a disruptive ‘Matter’ like brand to do the same in this sector.

Connecting the Dots

Nancy Gillis from the First Movers Coalition — a coalition of companies creating early markets for innovative clean technologies — resonated with us when she stated, "We have up to 20 years of strategies, and we have done the ground pilot projects, but how can we not figure out how to connect them?" The transition from strategy to implementation remains unclear, with obstacles such as key suppliers unwilling to pivot, businesses reluctant to pay premiums, and certification barriers.

Ultimately the goal is for all the different companies to come together and connect the dots to set a globally unified approach and ultimately reach their united mission — to decarbonise the world. IKEA’s effort to make direct partnerships and pay premiums to accelerate decarbonising is a positive move to evolve and change behaviours.

Helping People and Businesses to Pivot

Due to the mass of choice, brands looking to invest in decarbonising data are struggling to find the best calculator that can cover all grounds. VEV, a holistic company providing end-to-end solutions for fleet electrification, discussed how to increase EV adoption by providing reassurance for both the heart and mind. Setting a foundation of trust in the journey for the heart and for the mind providing relevant data for their business that identifies exactly where they can improve performance.

Beyond EV and energy, there was a range of green architecture and material solutions. For example, Pollution Solution presented Road Vent, a system that removes carbon emissions from roads through an underground vent, and Duracryl who are using tools such as 3D printing to create green and impactful finishes including bio-based materials.

In summary, it was encouraging to see a great number of initiatives being deployed to reach our 2030 net-zero ambitions. The majority of the players in attendance were on the transport, energy, infrastructure and supplier protagonists in the story, we would have liked to have seen more consumer-facing brands to complete the picture — though we at NewTerritory are working with such brands on themes like these and others. Our strategy team takes pride in connecting the dots between different teams within established and start-up organisations to develop north star strategies that resonate with the whole company and in turn future-proof product development over Now, Next and Wow.

Images courtesy of Innovation Zero 2023

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