Aligning short term innovation efforts with long term desired changes
Designing Sustainable Consumption Practices: An Innovation Portfolio
People involved
Hannah Goss (me)
Nynke Tromp
Rick Schifferstein
Jotte de Koning
FETE consortium
Drawings by Maria Sofia and Sterra Wilcox
Project Output
Conference Paper
Journal Paper in April 205
When
During PhD
Challenge
The Dutch food system faces persistent challenges in reducing food waste and transitioning toward a sustainable future. The aim was to design a new consumption practice that fosters flexible, waste-free behaviors in daily life while driving systemic change. With this aim I explored how and where food system stakeholders involved in the consortium project on transitioning the food system toward less food waste could intervene. For instance through conceptualising new business positioning, products, and services in the short short-term in a way that would foster toward the envisioned long-term changes. Based on the business activities of the consortium the innovations needed to be consumer facing.
The questions I explored were:
How can designers frame complex system dynamics for innovating in transitions?
What new consumption practice can support the transiton to enough?
What new joint innovations can support the transition of the food system to cater to enough.
Key to this challenge was understanding individual behaviour change within systemic contexts, how behavioural change might unfold over time, and the relationship between current and future dynamics when designing innovation proposals.
Approach
Portfolio development
Co-creation workshops
New business roles
Diary studies and interviewing
To develop innovations to foster the transitions I needed to ensure that the concepts resonated with both consortium stakeholders who would implement the innovations, and consumers who would be using them in their daily life. Therefore, I conducted two different studies, one with stakeholders and one with consumers.
1) Stakeholders:
To develop joint innovations, I conducted two half-day workshops with 5 stakeholders to establish their readiness to enter and foster the transition.
Workshop 1 focused on mapping stakeholders networks, assessing their power and interest in the transition, and identifying a transition path for aligned innovation. Stakeholders reflected on obstacles and opportunities along this path, and developed initial innovation concepts that their organisations could contribute to.
Workshop 2 evaluated a new consumption practice and several innovations I developed based on workshop 1, with stakeholders evaluating the potential for societal impact and business feasibility. Additionally, they indicated which behaviours of the new consumption practice were strongest and weakest for the transition and explored potential experiments they could support.
2) Consumers:
To explore how innovations could help reduce food waste, I worked with 11 Dutch households (43 participants) through a combination of diaries and interviews. This approach gave me valuable insights into the challenges and motivations households face when trying to adopt more sustainable habits. Based on these findings, I identified five key ways to support consumers, which were incorporated into the portfolio of innovations.
Outcomes
Adaptable Consumption: a new practice
Innovation Portfolio
Conceptual Framework
Building on insights from both studies, I developed a new practice called Adaptable Consumption. This practice encourages consumers to adopt flexible, waste-free behaviours in daily life while contributing to broader system changes. It includes embracing seasonal and harvest variability, thinking in terms of meal types rather than specific ingredients, and building food literacy around use-by dates and creative ingredient mixing to boost confidence in adapting meal plans.
To bring this practice to life, I created a comic strip showing a consumer's week engaging with these behaviours and an innovation portfolio of 21 concepts illustrating how the practice could grow and evolve over time.
One key research contribution was developing a conceptual framework that defines future practices by connecting 1) new system principles driving the transition, 2) new organisational roles that organisations can take now in the transition, and 3) new behaviours and capabilities people can adopt tomorrow is a fruitful way to frame system dynamics for innovating in transition design challenges.
This framing supports designers in identifying short-term innovations that drive longer-term systemic change by reflecting on different system scales (micro, meso, macro) and timeframes (now, near future, far future). This framing can be applied to other design challenges aiming to foster long term impact.