The following article was written by Jenny Andersson and is reposted from the RSA’s Website.

The globalisation of business has brought many positives, especially where increased trade has helped to bring millions out of poverty. But it has significantly increased negative impact on planetary ecosystems and stability. In developing global business systems, we have lost our sense of connection to the ‘bio-uniqueness of place’. The products we consume may have some sense of origin but their component parts and their production, shipping and distribution triangle is a global one.

Could we expect to see a move towards ‘regional production for regional consumption’ in the future? Re-regionalisation or localisation of business, social and environmental strategies is currently in early stages. So what are the options? And how could we redesign to refocus on locality? Here are four options:

1. Fully Bioregional ReDesign

An innovative product design and manufacturing experiment by Ecover in Majorca looked at designing cleaning products for the local market – tourism – from local waste streams. The objective for Ecover was to see if it could become an international knowledge holder and work with other organisations in the future to emphasise the power and potential of glocal business and product development. To achieve this, the innovation department attempted to see if it could produce detergents and floor cleaners from material sourced in the local environment  in a non-toxic process— such as waste streams like lemon peel – and then sell the end product to local businesses in the 500,000-bed tourist industry. The group worked with the local chemical industry, which had already shown an interest in greener chemistry, to try to create greener products.

One of the key learning outcomes of the experiment was to see that when you try to work with bioregional organic waste streams,  the by-products of fossil fuels will also decline in use; the result was shrinking the industrial material cycle of the circular economy diagram in order to help to grow the biocultural resources.

The opportunity of regionalised innovation could help shift to a biomaterials-based circular economy, which could in turn improve the social, economic, environmental health of the region in which the business system is embedded.

2. Local regeneration with global distribution

Founded as early as 1991, ethical brand People Tree focused its organisational design on raising the quality of life and share of voice for smallholders, artisans and craftspeople in developing nations. Founder Safia Minney’s goal was to find a business model that helps create a voice for the people who have the lightest economic footprint in the world and who have no capacity to negotiate a CDM programme to bring them the tiny economic benefit that exporting their goods could do. By putting Fairtrade farmers, artisans, garment workers, producers at the heart of the brand it was able to drive economic and environmental benefit to localities.

In their selection, they ensured there was fair pay for workers, but also integrated the wider community. Designing creches to help women work, making sure workers and families had access to clean water or had bank accounts and also gave literacy training. This was a very early approach to regionalised development by weaving the social, environmental and cultural development of the area into the product story. Of course People Tree still exports product around the world but it is a viable business model in the current economic system.

3. People-Centred Regeneration

A great example of people-focused regional experiment is healthcare startup Wellbeing Teams. Wellbeing Teams in the UK is redesigning social support for people through locally hired teams; these teams work solely on the wellbeing needs of their own locality with a key diversity approach.

Typically in home care, employees would be likely to be older people, often over-50s. Wellbeing Teams intentionally brought in people of all ages and groups, but also made very clear that they should come from the locality they are going to work in, so as to best reflect the values, customs and ethnicity of the area. Helen’s vision is that Wellbeing Teams should offer an opportunity for young people to explore whether or not working in a self-managed business is for them, where the fact that it’s a care business happens to also be part of the equation.

4. Regenerative Innovation

Innovation is rapidly gaining pace in many areas of manufacturing, not least food, land and fashion. Ethical footwear brand PoZu uses fabric made from pineapple leaves to replace animal leather for example. These leaves are an unused by-product of pineapple farming and can be used to manufacture fabric that mimics all the properties of leather, locally to the pineapple fields. It’s possible to produce a leather-like fabric from mushrooms. Currently it’s not possible to both produce materials and have footwear production in one locality at costs which are commercially viable for smaller businesses like PoZu.

ReGen Network is a global community and platform focused on ecological monitoring and regeneration. Using state of the art satellite and on the ground technology to improve understanding of the state of land, oceans and watersheds, ReGen enables farmers and land stewards to accurately measure the improvement of land and soil quality. Using Blockchain, it enables farmers to earn additional financial rewards for verified positive changes, which generates a second income in addition to their crop – an experimental way to catalyse the regeneration of ecosystems worldwide.

Jenny Andersson FRSA curates and hosts global discussions on regenerative strategies and works with business leaders and teams to craft conversations that catalyse innovation inside businesses and organisations.

The post From Global to Glocal: How to shift from extractive to generative entrepreneurship appeared first on P2P Foundation.

There is an important role for international trade and global exchange of goods and services, but not when it comes to meeting basic regional needs. Wherever feasible we should meet our needs as locally or regionally as possible and restrict the global exchange of goods to those that cannot be produced in a particular place.

Open innovation and knowledge-sharing at a global scale will be an important part of the process of re-localizing production and some global companies are already beginning to explore how to reinvent themselves as facilitators of the shift towards ‘distributed manufacturing’ and ‘the circular economy’.

Since 2013, together with Forum for the Future, I have been involved in conceiving and implementing a long-range innovation project for the Belgian manufacturer of ecological cleaning products and detergents Ecover. The project uses the unique island conditions of Majorca as a test field to explore how a global company like Ecover can help to facilitate a shift towards localized production for localized consumption based on local material and energy resources and in collaboration with local business partners. In the process we studied the potential of the Majorcan bioeconomy to deliver — in a regenerative way — enough biological raw materials (from waste streams) to produce cleaning products for the local market.

The island is particularly dependent on imports of consumer products and food, due to the increased demand caused by 16 million tourist visits each year. While the long-term sustainability of such mass tourism is more than questionable, these visitor numbers provide the economic engine that can finance the transition towards local production, food and energy infrastructures.

Ecover and ‘Forum for the Future’ collaborated with an on-island network of multi- sector stakeholders to create a showcase that, if successful, could serve as a transferable example and a model for a region-focused shift towards a renewable energy and materials-based circular economy (see Glocal, 2015).

Slide from one of my presentations about the Mallorca Glocal project with Ecover and Forum for the Future

We learned some very important lessons. Simply embarking on the process of co-creating an inspirational experiment like this and involving diverse stakeholders in it contributed to the wider transformation towards a regenerative culture. The conversation about re-localizing production and consumption on Majorca has started.

The regional experiment aimed to take a step towards a circular economy based on re-regionalizing production and consumption. It was motivated less by the potential for short-term economic success and more by the power of experimentation as a way to make sure we are asking the right questions. It catalysed a local design conversation while Ecover explores how it could reinvent itself as a global knowledge and business partner with a wide network of regional collaborators enabling distributed manufacturing and promoting regional economic development.

The transformation of our systems of production and consumption is a creative design challenge that will require whole-systems thinking and transformative innovation at its very best. The resulting disruptive innovations will ultimately make the existing system obsolete.

We were effectively trying to redesign production and consumption of chemical products, creating a local product by trying to operate more like an ecosystem. In an ecosystem, materials are sourced locally and assembled in non-toxic processes based on renewable energies.

The promise of this regionalized production system is a more diverse regional economy that generates jobs, encourages efficient use of regional waste streams as resources of production, helps local farmers get a good price for the food and biomaterials they grow, creates resilience by increasing self-reliance, reduces dependence on expensive imports, and contributes to the effort to quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by reducing transportation of feedstock and finished products.

The first steps towards achieving this are already being explored in many industrial ecology projects around the world (see Chapter 6). Even if some of these current projects are hybrid systems that still rely on fossil energy and non-renewable material resources, they are achieving increases in material and energy efficiency by connecting previously separate industrial processes in ways that turn one industry’s waste (whether material streams or waste heat) into another industry’s resource of production. They are second horizon(H2) stepping-stones to renewable energy-powered regenerative systems.

Unleashing the full potential of such ecosystems of production and consumption based on integrative industrial design requires regional collaboration across all sectors and all industries. The synergies that can be generated when previously separate industries are linked through ecological design thinking are substantial.

The book Blue Economy summarizes a number of such ground-breaking design solutions that are being implemented or are in advanced stages of development (Pauli, 2010). It offers inspiration for green entrepreneurs to get involved in H2+ transformative innovation.

The overall shift is away from a fossil fuel-based industrial system with centralized production facilities that rely on bringing raw materials from all corners of the Earth only to then distribute the finished products globally again. This wasteful system is based on outdated industrial design solutions developed during the first industrial revolution where the economics of mass-manufacturing meant bigger was better, and cheap abundant fossil fuels and non-renewable materials were taken for granted.

Currently, the vast majority of our consumer products contain petroleum-based materials. During the first half of the 21st century we will witness the transformation of this global system of production. We will begin to co-create a material culture that relies on locally available materials, green (plant-based) chemistry and renewable energy sources for regional production and consumption.

Integrative design based on whole-systems thinking and the kind of nature-inspired design solutions explored in the next two chapters will help us create ‘elegant solutions predicated by the uniqueness of place’. This is how my mentor Professor John Todd, a pioneer in his field, defines ecological design. Such solutions are an elegant blend of the best of modern technology and a rediscovered sensitivity to place, culture and traditional wisdom. New technologies are opening up a 21st-century, design-led re-localization enabled by global resource-sharing and cooperation.

Distributed manufacturing is becoming a reality as new 3D printing technologies enabling additive manufacturing at a small scale are developing rapidly alongside revolutionary approaches to open innovation based on peer-to-peer collaboration, the spread of ‘Fab-labs’ and a new maker culture, breakthroughs in material science, as well as diverse bio-economy projects. Much work is still needed in the area of developing locally grown and regenerated feedstock for 3D printing technologies.

The Open Source Ecology project started by Marcin Jakubowski demonstrates how inventors and technologists are already collaborating globally to recreate regional means of production that are increasingly independent of the centralized mass-production systems of multinationals.

The project’s aim is to create the ‘Global Village Construction Set’, an open-source design and engineering library of detailed blueprints that will enable people with basic engineering and technical skills to create the 50 most important machines needed to build a sustainable civilization. We are beginning to ask:

How can we implement the global shift towards increased regional production for regional consumption?

How can we create effective systems of open-source innovation that enable people globally to share know-how and design innovations?

How can we ensure that re-regionalizing production and consumption will happen within the bioproductivity limits of each particular region, and strike a balance between growing food and growing industrial resources regionally?

How can we make 3D printing technologies sustainable by ensuring that they use locally produced, renewable and up-cyclable feedstock in environmentally benign ways, powered by decentralized renewable energy?

How can we use bio-refineries and advanced fermentation technologies to facilitate the shift from a fossil fuel-based organic chemistry to a solar- powered, plant-based and non-toxic chemistry in order to re-invent our material culture?

An early lesson we learnt in Majorca is that a successful bioeconomy requires widespread collaboration between sectors. Policy interventions are needed to regulate access to biological resources and their sustainable (regenerative) production and use. With limited bioproductive potential within a particular region, we must find ways to create ecosystems of collaboration that optimize the use of available resources.

Regenerative design solutions require whole-systems design conversations across all sectors of society. From these conversations a guiding vision will emerge. This vision can be made reality, one place at a time, by all of us. [At the time of writing, the Ecover Glocal project is not advancing, due to a lack of funding. It created a network of collaborators and planted a vision that is likely to be taken up again in the future.]

Image Source

[This is an excerpt from my book Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]

Photo by POC21 – Proof of Concept

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