The Soccket - A Fun Social Innovation

by Kevin Roberts

Tackling climate change is too important to leave to politicians! It's a job for the inventors, the innovators, the radical optimists. Because of them, the clean energy revolution is already underway, in big ways and small. I stumbled across this amazing idea, and I wanted to share it with you.

Meet the Soccket, a "fun, portable energy-harvesting energy source in the form of a soccer ball". That's right - it is a football that captures the energy of each kick, throw or header to be reused later as a tiny power generator. For each 15 minutes of play, it generates enough energy to power an LED light for three hours.

The Soccket has been trialed successfully in Durban, South Africa - home to this year's Soccer World Cup, as well as to millions of young people who love nothing more than to kick a ball around, often in communities with not enough safe, reliable sources of energy. The inventors see it as a community builder and public health tool as well as being, well, a soccer ball. They plan to develop a high-end version for sale in the US and Europe. An inspired and inspiring idea!


Don't miss an article - Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group!

Image source: ecofriend

---

Kevin Roberts is the CEO worldwide of The Lovemarks Company, Saatchi & Saatchi. For more information on Kevin, please go to www.saatchikevin.com. To see this blog at its original source, please go to www.krconnect.blogspot.com.

You Were Born to Save the Planet

Adam Werbach, the CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi S, recently spoke at the 5th Annual Teens Turning Green Summit in California to an audience of keen, sustainability-minded young people. His message - on the opportunities this generation has to create positive change and the power of DOTs - clearly resonated, and is now spreading like wildfire on the web. It's a welcome shot of inspiration for anyone, whether you're teen or senior, whether you consider yourself Green or Blue. Below is a shortened version of Adam's speech, you can read the full version here. - Kevin Roberts


by Adam Werbach

The Earth needs you right now. Our ecological systems are in decline, one-third of fish species stand at the verge of collapse, the glaciers of the Himalayas, which provide drinking water to over a billion people, are rapidly melting, the chemicals we're putting in us, on us and around us are forming complex endocrine disrupting compounds that are in every one of our bodies. Tonight hundreds of thousands of Haitians are sleeping below flimsy plastic shelters wondering where they'll find their next meal, wondering when their kids will start going to school again.

All of this bad news should make me crawl up into a ball. But instead I'm oddly optimistic, like a kid looking for coins in a payphone. The world may be screwed up, but it's changing faster than ever. Your challenge is to make the type of change we want at the speed we need. And you have it in your neural programming to make it so. Recent brain studies show that your brain moves faster when you're younger, so you're bringing more processing power to the challenge. All of that texting and facebooking is going to pay off in spades. The world is changing and your generation was born to save the planet.

Any movement starts with yourself. I ask you to pick a DOT - DOT stands for Do One Thing. One thing that's good for you, good for the planet, that you do regularly. Maybe it's yoga or riding your bike or saving energy. But it's one thing you do to put your body where your mouth is. We need a billion DOTs. One billion people all making their own commitments. Take a moment now and choose your own DOT. Share it with a friend. Keep it going. Pick another. And it all adds up. If every high schooler turned the thermostat in their house down by one degree Celsius, it would be like reducing 100,000 tanker trucks of gasoline, or taking over a million cars off the road.

Right now there are about 6.7 billion people on the planet. And there's an emerging bulge of teenagers at the bottom of the demographic pyramid that exists because fertility rates are dropping globally. By 2011 there will be 7 billion people and 1 billion teenagers on the planet. Can you imagine 1 billion teenagers? Can you imagine them talking all at once? Now imagine them all walking in the same direction in a line that's as long as 1,000,000 Empire State Buildings. Can you see it? The line would stretch around the earth fifteen times. Can you see it? Now imagine one billion DOTs. All coming together. I'll bet on that.


Don't miss an article - Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group!

---

Kevin Roberts is the CEO worldwide of The Lovemarks Company, Saatchi & Saatchi. For more information on Kevin, please go to www.saatchikevin.com. To see this blog at its original source, please go to www.krconnect.blogspot.com.

Will Apple or Microsoft Dominate Home Energy Management?

by Idris Mootee

Home energy management is hot and I've seen more than a dozen of companies having a very similar approach. It is almost hopeless for small start-ups to play this same, as many deep pockets have been working on this for a long time. Whirlpool and energy retailer Direct Energy have joined forces to showcase what the energy efficient home of the future will look like at the CES. I've seen some cool stuff from them.

I don't think anyone have nailed it yet. Whirlpool Home Energy Manager (HEM) includes appliances that tap into a unified network to communicate how much energy they are using, when, why, and how much it is costing. This type of data transmission is what will eventually make it possible for your clothing dryer to know to turn on after your washing machine has finished the cycle. Or let you finish watching your 7.2 Dolby home movie before the oven starts baking. The goal is to optimize the use the of energy between all appliances.



User experience design is still one big challenge and OpenPeak is doing a pretty decent job. They have an iPhone like touch-screen dashboard to manage appliances to run at certain times, use that to change settings and to display consumption data. There are many other players such as Tendril, EnergyHub, People Power, Control4, and OPOWER. Whirlpool appliances, Lennox thermostats and OpenPeak dashboards together create the product package and Direct Energy will be testing the market in Houston.


The latest player, guess who, is Apple. They just filed an application this week called the Intelligent Power Monitoring that allow people to reduce energy use by giving them tools to manage how connected devices are powered. Users could get recommendations on when to schedule gadget charging to take advantage of off-peak rates, for example. Or the electronics controller could put devices in hibernate mode after a set amount of time. Users could have a display, such as an LCD screen, or a movable projector to control these tasks and monitor electricity use. No question this will be the coolest one.



Apple talks about power management in its patent application as: "Some personal computers sometimes are being left on simply to serve as power supplies for the charging of the aforementioned portable devices via connections, such as USB connections, that provide power in addition to data (rather than charging those devices from the household electric service using their dedicated chargers), even though the power supply of a personal computer is much larger than is needed for such a function, and as such draws much more power than such a function would otherwise demand. As the price of electricity increases, such uses of power can cost users more."



This is definitely going to be another platform play, both from a standard and user experience perspectives. Microsoft is also active in this space and giving away its energy management tool Hohm to consumers for free. Distribution is a key factor here and both Apple and Microsoft has no apparent advantages. Is this going to be Microsoft vs Apple all over gain?


Enjoy this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group!

---

Idris Mootee is the CEO of idea couture, a strategic innovation and experience design firm. He is the author of four books, tens of published articles, and a frequent speaker at business conferences and executive retreats.

Old Dogs Can Learn New Tricks

by Kevin Roberts

Newspapers are up against it in the Participation Economy, the Internet-powered revolution of joining in, taking part, sharing and joy. For the modern consumer, the idea of reading newspapers full of day-old news hand-picked by faceless editors seems, well, very early 90's.

These days we get to be our own editor-in-chief, selecting the bits of news, opinion and analysis that best suit our tastes, politics or predilections. The news business still hasn't worked out a way to make this work financially, but I suspect that will change soon. Free is not sustainable. Walter Isaacson, former editor of Time, proposed one possible approach to the issue of payment here.

There may be some spark in the old format yet. On the first day of the climate talks in Copenhagen, 56 newspapers in 20 languages pulled off a dramatic and high-impact stunt. They simultaneously published a front-page editorial calling for action on climate change. Papers included The Guardian (which got the ball rolling), the Toronto Star, the Jakarta Globe, Le Monde, The Brunei Times, la Repubblica and The Cambodia Daily.

This degree of collaboration across geographical and political boundaries carries a high degree of difficulty. Whatever you think about the editorial itself, the scale and audacity of the maneuver is impressive. The old-school newspaper editorial is long past its heyday, but - on this occasion at least - some creative thinking and collaboration breathed some life back into the art-form.


Image Source: http://babycreativeblog.com/copenhagen/

---

Kevin Roberts is the CEO worldwide of The Lovemarks Company, Saatchi & Saatchi. For more information on Kevin, please go to www.saatchikevin.com. To see this blog at its original source, please go to www.krconnect.blogspot.com.

Is Search Killing the Planet?

Everytime you search on Google, you are adding to the consumption of 1% of the world's energy

by Idris Mootee

Here is a lesser-known fact. Data centers use up tons of energy just for cooling, and in a typical data center only 40-45% of energy use is for the actual computing - the rest is used mostly for cooling down the servers. Data centers' emissions of carbon dioxide have been running at around one third of those of airlines, but are growing 10% a year and now approach levels of entire countries such as Argentina or the Netherlands.

Apple is building its own server farm. Apple has secured a $300 million tax cut from North Carolina politicians in exchange for investing $1 billion over nine years for a so-called technology "hub." Wonder why Apple needs such a big server farm? There's only one reason, Apple is contemplating a large-scale strategic shift to deliver multiple applications as a service on an enhanced Apple device, which I think will be entertainment related.

Back to the energy saving topic, here's one of the greenest data centers on earth which will be housed in a massive cave beneath an orthodox Christian cathedral in Helsinki. It is a former bomb shelter carved into the rock by the fire brigade in World War Two as a refuge for city officials from Russian air raids. Excess heat from hundreds of computer servers will be captured and fed into the district's heating network, a system of water-heated pipes used to warm homes in the city. This makes perfect sense and I don't see why these server farms need to be in California. Should we move all our servers to Scandinavia, Northern Canada and Alaska?

Data centers such as those run by Google already use around 1% of the world's energy, and their demand for power is rising fast with the trend to outsource computing. Every time you search on Google, you are adding to the consumption of that 1%. Research firm Gartner issued four recommendations for improving energy management for corporations:

• Raise the temperature at the server inlet point up to 71 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit (24 degrees Celsius), but use sensors to monitor potential hotspots.


• Develop a dashboard of datacenter energy-efficient metrics that provides appropriate data to different levels of IT and financial management.


• Use the SPECpower benchmark to evaluate the relative energy efficiency of servers.


• Improve the use of the existing infrastructure through consolidation and virtualization before building out or buying new/additional datacenter floor space.

Some called this the Moore's Law of data centers, the growth of cooling requirements parallels the growth of computing power, which roughly doubles every 18 months. That has brought the energy challenge of data centers to the top of the list. Have you come across any innovation allows waste heat from servers or data centers to be recycled (or managed) in a non-traditional way that conserves energy? There must be a solution.

---

Idris Mootee is the CEO of idea couture, a strategic innovation and experience design firm. He is the author of four books, tens of published articles, and a frequent speaker at business conferences and executive retreats.

Do Ten Things, Do 100 Things

Ikea OGLA chair - made from 100% post-consumer plastic waste

by Kevin Roberts

I wrote a few weeks ago about Do One Thing, the Saatchi & Saatchi S initiative to personalize sustainable actions. Real change requires a ground swell of action, but as companies we can take decisive steps that have impact.

Walmart recently discontinued issuing paper checks to its employees in favor of electronic payments. By that stroke alone it will save some 257,572 pounds of paper a year.

Tesco in the UK has announced that it is now diverting 100% of its waste from landfills. This is no small feat, since it encompasses all of Tesco's 2300 stores and distribution centers in the UK.

Marks & Spencer has pledged to meet 100 separate commitments to reduce impacts within a five-year time-frame, and has already achieved 39 of those within the first two years.

Here are ten things Ikea did to be more sustainable:

1. Replace polyvinylchloride (PVC) in wallpapers, home textiles, shower curtains, lampshades, and furniture - PVC has been eliminated from packaging and is being phased out in electric cables;


2. Minimize the use of formaldehyde in its products, including textiles;


3. Eliminate acid-curing lacquers;


4. Produce a model of chair (OGLA) made from 100% post-consumer plastic waste;


5. Introduce a series of air-inflatable furniture products into the product line. Such products reduce the use of raw materials for framing and stuffing and reduce transportation weight and volume to about 15% of that of conventional furniture;


6. Reduce the use of chromium for metal surface treatment;


7. Limit the use of substances such as cadmium, lead, PCB, PCP, and AZO pigments;


8. Use wood from responsibly-managed forests that replant and maintain biological diversity;


9. Use only recyclable materials for flat packaging and "pure" (non-mixed) materials for packaging to assist in recycling.


10. Introduce rental bicycles with trailers for customers in Denmark.
    At Saatchi & Saatchi, we're setting goals relating to optimal management of our buildings, and doing less traveling. And individually our employees each declare what their DOT is.

There's an interesting exchange on the post I published a few weeks ago on DOT - a reader claiming that the "incremental steps" model does not achieve transformative change. Adam Werbach responds to this and other views on this, and how he believes the "bottom-of-the-pyramid" actions on the part of the general population have a major effect on decisions made by companies and governments. More on this to come.

---

Kevin Roberts is the CEO worldwide of The Lovemarks Company, Saatchi & Saatchi. For more information on Kevin, please go to www.saatchikevin.com. To see this blog at its original source, please go to www.krconnect.blogspot.com.

Flash Mobs and the Participation Economy

Kevin Roberts will be speaking at the World Business Forum in New York City, October 6-7, 2009. Here is our latest hand-picked article:

Source: daylife.com
Seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong (C, black shirt, yellow helmet) rides in Los Angeles' Griffith Park with local cyclists on September 10, 2009


by Kevin Roberts

A couple of weeks ago a few hundred people got together in LA for a bike ride. No big deal, right? The ride included over 500 cyclists and was organized in less than 24 hours with one short message: "Hey LA -- get out of your cars and get on your bikes. Time to ride. 7:30 tomorrow am. Griffith Park, LA Zoo parking lot. See you there."

The message was sent via Twitter by none other than Lance Armstrong. The next day hundreds of cyclists turned out to ride along side their hero. How often do you get to say you rode with a seven-time Tour de France winner? Some of the riders were said to have driven long distances to join the rare opportunity.

This was not Lance's first time organizing a flash mob of cyclists. Recently in Dublin more than 1,200 cyclists showed up, some even dressed in work suits. The star power brought Dublin to a standstill.

Flash mobs like this are nothing new. There's the Worldwide Pillow Fight Day, which started in New York, and of course London's Silent Disco, where thousands of people listening to their iPods danced in public in eerie silence. There's also a No Pants day where people commute to work without wearing trousers. 1,100 New Yorkers rode the subway without trousers during a snow storm.

These all point not only to the power of a good idea, but also to our desire to be part of something bigger than ourselves. We want to participate in something unique. Our award-winning T-Mobile spot Life's for Sharing tapped into the power and energy of this thought.

Increasingly, we have the means to participate like this more and more, and faster and faster. The truly great ideas, for brands or for anyone, will be those idea that give us an opportunity to contribute and play a part.

Back in LA, Lance sent out a short message of thanks...and perhaps a new opportunity? "Great ride in Griffith Park. Thanks, LA! And thanks to the LAPD for the help. Off to Montreal..."


It's not too late to catch Kevin Roberts at the World Business Forum in New York City, October 6-7, 2009.

---

Kevin Roberts is the CEO worldwide of The Lovemarks Company, Saatchi & Saatchi. For more information on Kevin, please go to www.saatchikevin.com. To see this blog at its original source, please go to www.krconnect.blogspot.com.

Do One Thing

Kevin Roberts will be speaking at the World Business Forum in New York City, October 6-7, 2009. Here is our latest hand-picked article:

by Kevin Roberts



For change to take real effect, it needs to be personalized. Saatchi & Saatchi S, our sustainability agency, is working with companies to implement nano-practices in the workplace to reduce carbon use.

We call this DIY contagion DOT, Do One Thing. Each person is encouraged to choose one thing to pursue regularity. It can be anything from cycling to work or doing laundry with cold water. It's just one thing, a start not a complete change of life. One person's DOT may stand alone, but connect a billion DOTs together and you'll see a movement of change happening.

Employees throughout our own network have shared their DOTs. Here are ten, from Sao Paolo to Singapore:

1. My DOT is to take public transportation to and from airports whenever possible.


2. I use the same bottle for water each day every day.


3. I am going to stop smoking.


4. I no longer use plastic shopping bags.


5. My family will no longer buy water in plastic bottles.


6. I turn off the tap while brushing my teeth.


7. I buy ecologic food and supplies, when possible.


8. I will not eat meat at least once a week.


9. I will drink coffee from a reusable mug whenever possible.


10. To find my bike in the cellar – yes, and to use it!

What's my DOT? Make one less flight per month. What's yours? It doesn't matter what it is, so long as you Do One Thing.




It's not too late to catch Kevin Roberts at the World Business Forum in New York City, October 6-7, 2009.

---

Kevin Roberts is the CEO worldwide of The Lovemarks Company, Saatchi & Saatchi. For more information on Kevin, please go to www.saatchikevin.com. To see this blog at its original source, please go to www.krconnect.blogspot.com.

Save the World - One Action at a Time

Saving water is going to become ever more important as time goes on. If you're easily offended, skip this one, but it's really pretty harmless and the ad campaign referenced is targeted at children.




by Kevin Roberts

A great ad is one that can be understood across borders without the need for subtitles or translation. That's the case with the TVC above created by F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi for the Brazilian environmental group SOS Mata Atlântica. The message here couldn't be any more clear.

SOS Mata Atlântica says that if a household avoids just one flush a day, it can save up to 4,380 litres (1,157 gallons) of water annually. It's the little ways we can make a difference each day. Adam Werbach, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi S, focuses on the impact of our collective "nano-practices" - the hundreds and thousands of tiny things you do each day that together make up your lifestyle. In his 'Birth of Blue' speech last year, he explained the idea: "How you tie your shoes, the type of shoes you wear, your choice of socks, how you fold your socks, and whether you wear your shoes indoors. Instead of trying to change the big things about someone's identity...we start by finding daily or recurring practices that can express his or her values." We all could cut down on our water consumption every day. It might be peeing in the shower, taking a shorter shower, or waiting a day to do a load of laundry. One thing can add up.

The other reason this TVC has had such a big response is the way it communicates with us. Sure, the environment is an important and serious topic, but preaching doom and gloom is no way to save the world. Instead of scare tactics and depressing statistics, this ad goes for humor, and there's no better spokesperson for tomorrow than kids. They can diffuse any situation. The campaign includes posters, a television film and a website which features a frog imploring us to pee in the shower, all to generate awareness about water wastage.

Saving the planet turns out to be easier than expected. Listen to the children and xixi no banho!

---

Kevin Roberts is the CEO worldwide of The Lovemarks Company, Saatchi & Saatchi. For more information on Kevin, please go to www.saatchikevin.com. To see this blog at its original source, please go to www.krconnect.blogspot.com.