Atelier MonthNote w/c June (except LCAW) 2025
INITIATIVES. Scaling up sustainable innovation: CISL event. ISR: 'Responding to Abundance: Yes, and…'. Absurd Intelligence
Welcome to the latest WeekNote -- oops -- MonthNote. As predicted, the 3 days a week with Absurd Intelligence has made writing a WeekNote harder, because of constraints on time and confidentiality. Even so, I've been up to lots that I can share. I’ll do a separate note on London Climate Action Week (LCAW).
This note covers:
INITIATIVES
Scaling up sustainable innovation: CISL event.
ISR: 'Responding to Abundance: Yes, and…'
Absurd Intelligence
How can the Atelier of What's Next be of service to you, and your purposes? We'd love to hear from you. Perhaps you have a challenge or idea to put in the studio. Maybe one of our existing topics appeals to you. What if you love to make new things happen by being part of the studio? Or if you have feedback or comments that would improve this deck. Either click the button below or email davidbent@atelierwhatsnext.org.
INITIATIVES
CISL event: Scaling up sustainable innovation
In the last WeekNote, I sent out a request for a 'Ready for Scaling' tools. Well, this week I ran the session at the CISL Canopy ('a community of impact-led startups, entrepreneurs and small businesses accelerating solutions to global sustainability challenges') on 'Scaling sustainability innovation'. I was able to do so because of the fantastic responses I got. So, huge thanks!
What people sent
Lots of people sent the NASA Technical Readiness Levels (TRLs). Even though I had mentioned those in my request (which shows...I knew about them already) and had said I wanted something different. Even so, some people did send through great stuff.
My colleague in UCL Institute for Sustainability, Dr Will McDowall, gave a bunch of attempts to create “commercial readiness levels” or “system readiness levels”, e.g.
Australian Renewable Energy Agency's Commercial Readiness Index for Renewable Energy Sectors.
EIT Urban Mobility's Commercial Readiness Levels.
The Carbon Trust's tool for assessing the commercial maturity of renewable energy technologies.
Innovate UK's Understanding Market Readiness Level.
Sauser et al's concept of Systems Readiness Levels.
Serial startup employee, David Steinore, sent an email with pointers. Here are some I've pulled out:
Many startups are good ideas, but not business ideas. Successful startups can go through many pivots to find the 'business idea' that is a profitable use of a particular technology. Founders need to be willing to give up their "good idea" to find the "business idea". Therefore, any lack of willingness to change is a red flag.
A founder that says "I have no clue, who do you have that can mentor/advise me?" is better than one who has a powerpoint of charts that don't survive 10 minutes of analysis and poking.
The Venture funding and requirement for a Return on Investment with multiples often destroys successful businesses.
"Scaling" is a nonsense word. Lean in hard on the people to provide details (tangible, concrete, measurable) for sustaining the "internals" of the company, the "support" needed to make the customers happy and the effort needed to "evolve/innovate" the product - as customers want more and competition shows up. lack of details is a red flag.
Different phases need different skills. The original founders may well not be the right people for long, disciplined road of scaling.
Harland Evans suggested the Geneva Association's Adoption Readiness Levels (ARLs). The ARLS has 4 aspects: Value proposition; Market Acceptance; Resource maturity (do you have the cashm manufacturing, supply chains and so on to make it); and, Licence to operate. So, quite similar to Grubb et al's Multiple Journeys.
What I went with
In the end I went with these key messages:
The scaling up of a firm is best understood as the cumulative customer growth at the product level, from zero to on-going maximum.
Scaling up is tough in any industry, but especially so for sustainability-related innovations. "Problems are not markets", as the great Rowan Conway tells us here.
Two frameworks to use:
Firm-centric: ‘Triple Chasm’ focusses on what the firm can to cross three valleys of death from zero to massive success.
System-centric: ‘Multi-Level Perspective’ (MLP) focusses on the wider economic processes for transforming industries. (For an interview with case study on using the MLP, try here.)
Firm-centric
The Triple Chasm Model by Uday Phadke and Shailendra Vyakarnam has a strong evidence base (for tech-led companies), and lots of tools under the surface to apply. (If you're going to buy the book, I recommend The Scale Up Manual.) It has not one valley of death but three:
Chasm I: From product or service concept to working prototype with a customer.
Chasm II: From an early product or service to a fully functional product or service with a commercially viable business model demonstrated with some customers.
Chasm III: From early customers to mainstream customers as the firm scales significantly.
They articulate these factors and important next steps for each Chasm:
System-centric
There's a strange contradiction in how entrepreneurs presented. On the one hand, they are these (usually male) heroes who put a dent in the universe. One the other, the 'how to' literature pretty much takes the context as fixed.
Yes, customers might, over time, understand your tech better. But most of the instructions are as David S said above, to keep an open mind and to pivot, pivot until you find a product-market fit.
I have explored the MLP in past WeekNotes. Here I was experimenting with using the Transformative Outcomes, which, as I wrote about here, is a poor label. I'd say 'on-going functions that area usually needed for transformative change'.
What I wanted to emphasise is that succeeding as a start-up isn't just about you putting a dent in the universe, but joining in with, and accelerating, the wider socio-economic processes which are denting the universe.
The 'Transformative Outcomes' are organised in three sets of four:
Building and nurturing niches, so there are innovations that can be adopted by the mainstream.
Expanding and mainstreaming niches, so that innovations move into the regime.
Opening up and unlocking regimes, so that the existing mainstream gets out of the way.
Exercise
The final part of the session was an exercise, with the objectives
Help you identify your current stage and possible next steps to scaling.
Give a method you can apply in the future.
Steps
Choose one start-up at the table to focus on.
Identify the chasm you are facing.
Identify what need to do to cross that chasm.
Identify larger change processes to contribute to and surf.
Given how much content, new to most folks, was embedded in the exercise, it went surprisingly well.
WHAT NEXT
You can read the whole deck here.
The Atelier has a burgeoning domain of 'focus' on the for-impact, usually for-profit, start-up ecosystem (Venture Partner at Conduit Connect, Mentor at Undaunted, Fellow at Zinc). This wasn't planned, per se. But it is not surprising. A certain kind of technology-led change often comes from that milieu. Also, things that could be described as 'venture builders' are good places to learn stuff that's useful for an 'initiative builder' (fingers crossed).
The Triple Chasm analysis can be applied to Absurd Intelligence (which is probably cross Chasm II at the moment).
ISR: 'Responding to Abundance: Yes, and…'
Background
The UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources (ISR) had its Summer Away Day during June. The content of the event is confidential, of course. I was asked to give my thoughts on a book which has been causing something of a storm in the US: Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
If you've not come across the book, the authors describe the core of their argument in this podcast. The wikipeida entry summarises the argument as:
The regulatory environment in many liberal cities, while well-intentioned, stymies development.
American liberals have been more concerned with blocking bad economic development than promoting good development since the 1970s.
Democrats have focused on the process rather than results and favored stasis over growth by backing zoning regulations, developing strict environmental laws, and tying expensive requirements to public infrastructure spending.
They propose an Abundance Agenda that they say better manages the tradeoffs between regulations and social advancement and lament that America is stuck between a progressive movement that is too afraid of growth and a conservative movement that is allergic to government intervention.
I haven't read the book, but I have read lots of commentary (Andrew Curry sceptical here; Noah Smith fiercely positive here) and I listened to the podcast.
I took this as a chance to use the Depth of Change Spectrum as a framing device. The spectrum, which was inspired by a diagram in Andreotti's Hospicing Modernity, posits there are at least 6 ways to relate to the status quo: More of the Same; Soft Reform; Strong Reform; Radical Resistance; Deep Transformation; Make Good Ruins.
My current conclusion:
There is a response to our situation which is more than 'Strong Reform', uses the insights of ‘Radical Resistance’ but not retreating to 'Make Good Ruins'. I'm giving that strategy zone the working title of 'Deep Transformation'.
While Strong Reform is necessary, and Make Good Ruins a legitimate back-up, I think we need to develop more and more initiatives in this Deep Transformation zone.
Yes, and...
I have sympathy with a view that the planning process is stopping stuff that needs to happen (see
's NimbyWatch) and that sustainability has fallen into procedure rather than production (for instance, how the sustainable investment world focuses on reporting disclosure rather than driving industrial revolutions on a deadline).I also am taken with Adam Tooze's analysis that Trump’s victory can be seen as a revolt against the Professional Managerial Classes, who benefited from globalisation, talk about social justice but rarely act for it.
But, at least in the podcast, there was so much missing. What about...
The Republicans’ cynical obstruction of Obama and Biden?
The Right’s creation of an information sphere which is detached from observable reality?
Growth in quasi-monopolies and therefore corporate power?
Global finance acting as neoliberalism’s enforcer?
The rise of neo-feudalism (creaming in rents now, not investing for profits later)?
In terms of what to do, my key question to the Institute was:
What is the research and teaching that accelerates on-going ‘industrial revolutions on a deadline’ in a Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible (BANI) world?
For instance:
What are the pathways out of the current status quo which do not rely on the ‘everything bagel’?
What are the sustainable (all senses), future economic configurations which (see this WeekNote for the reasoning behind this question):
Outcompete today’s currently-existing economies; and,
Sustainability is hard-wired into the inner dynamics (rather than grafted on to ‘tame’ the inherently extractive inner dynamics).
How can there be outsized incentives for sectoral transition (with and without government-led industrial policy)?
How can there be cultural, social and political movements which act for transformation?
WHAT NEXT
You can read the whole deck here.
Absurd Intelligence
Absolutely TONNES gong on within Absurd Intelligence. Unfortunately, most of what I am doing and learning can't go public yet. So, all I can do right now is point at some thing that are in the public domain
What's in a name? "When the world’s gone utterly snooker-loopy, Absurdity is the only answer." I'd add that, when you take a step back, nothing is as absurd as the status quo (and unconsciously believing that today’s normal is the only normal that is possible).
Don't touch my bottom! An example of absurdity getting cut-through. Absurd Intelligence and Ocean Rebellion on getting huge attention in the French media, in order to ban bottom trawling for fishing.
Lots more soon!