Throughout history, scientists have been building on the work of those who came before them. Each new discovery, invention or piece of research has paved the way for future innovation and because of this, scientific innovation has continued to increase exponentially.

Jim Woods, CEO of The Crowd, an incubator of new digital products that help big companies tackle climate change and other important issues facing society, believes that this cumulative approach to innovation doesn’t need to stop with science. According to Jim, this approach could help large corporations to cut carbon emissions by a whopping 20%. And all they have to do is share…

From the shoulders of giants

The Crowd was born from a company called Green Mondays, an events business focused on helping organisations tackle sustainability. Jim joined Green Mondays in 2010. He wasn’t much interested in events, but was fascinated by the range of knowledge the Green Mondays community held and started to think about the mechanisms behind hyper-efficient knowledge sharing.

“We looked back at periods of profound change in history” says Jim. “We went back to the arrival of the printing press and how that had democratised knowledge and how it paved the way for the industrial revolution.

“[We looked at] how actually at the heart of the industrial revolution were these coffee shops where people met, where industrialists and investors and scientists all came together and discussed their ideas….

“We looked at the arrival of the peer review process in science and how when Sir Isaac Newton accepted an award he said ‘if I’ve seen further it has been on the shoulders of giants’. What he was doing there was he was starting to recognise the collaboration process that was starting to emerge in science which evolved into the scientific method and the peer review process.

“[We looked at] how scientists today are all building on each other’s work and the rate of innovation has grown exponentially as a result of that….

“In our view, it was these moments that allowed people to efficiently share knowledge that have been connected to these periods of great innovation. We took that philosophy and said ‘how can we effectively play the role of the printing press, or Google, to our community of people and help them to learn from each other in a much more efficient way than they can today?’”

Upon realising the potential their community held, Jim and the team realised that building digital platforms was going to be the most efficient way of enabling extraordinary knowledge sharing. “Our advantage was that we had these fantastic relationships with the business community through the events program where we’d built up a lot of trust. We were able to say to them ‘would you collaborate with us on this new idea?’”

Going naked with Sainsbury’s

In September 2012, Green Mondays was approached by national supermarket chain, Sainsbury’s, who wanted to sense check their sustainability program with the Green Mondays community. “We did it all on Survey Monkey” says Jim “because we’re big believers in lean innovation, so you use whatever tools exist”.

155 senior peers, including heads of sustainability from competitors like Waitrose and Tesco, spent around an hour of their time reviewing Sainsbury’s’ program.

“They wrote this book, which was 77 pages long, on their strategy and the deal was that everyone who shared their thinking into that process got the whole of the information back. It was all anonymised so you couldn’t see who’d said what. They [Sainsbury’s] loved it because they got a snapshot of the intelligence coming out of their peers, a snapshot of what they were thinking.”

Once the responses had been collected, Green Mondays held an event where Justin King, the Chief Executive of Sainsbury’s at the time, responded to the community. “I know a lot of people from different companies who went the whole way through all of the 77 pages to get ideas from it” says Jim. “Crucially it changed Sainsbury’s’ strategy in a few key areas particularly around how they’re engaging their customers on sustainability issues… They created this new group of sustainability leaders in the business sector who became stakeholders in their strategy.”

Stop reinventing the wheel

It was around this time that Green Mondays evolved into The Crowd (the company changed its name in 2013), to put the emphasis on the community it had built up. Ben asked Jim to take over the running of the business, allowing him to develop a new business called Farmdrop, whilst remaining a non-executive director (and continues to sit on the board to this day). Under Jim’s direction, the aim has been to take The Crowd into a mechanism for exponential change. Drawing inspiration from disruptive businesses such as TripAdvisor and Uber.

“Last year we sat down and thought well, these guys [The Crowd’s community of sustainability professionals] are all reinventing the wheel to varying degrees, particularly in certain areas like carbon and energy management. They’re all looking at putting in LED lighting, they’re all looking at boiler controls, they’re all looking at putting solar panels on roofs… there’s about 15 categories of energy management that are generic to all businesses.”

For big businesses, energy management is a non-core issue, points out Jim, so they typically have very small teams working across all of their sites. “So we thought what would happen if they started to learn from each other?… We felt that in sustainability there is a chance to collaborate that there often isn’t in business, where a lot of the knowledge is too commercially sensitive for companies to be sharing. But with sustainability, where society has vested interested in these issues, where you’re generally not talking about the top 5 determinants in their share price, [we felt] that there was a chance that they’d do that.”

To validate the hypothesis that large corporations could benefit from learning from each other (and that they’d be willing to share in the first place), The Crowd invited their community to share a few of their energy investments. 53 companies submitted data, with most of them sharing 2 or 3 of their investments (a tiny snapshot of their portfolio). The benefits were obvious immediately, with big car manufacturer deciding to triple their energy management budget after seeing the payoffs their peers had had.

Once they’d realised that corporations would be willing to share, and that this sharing could be invaluable, Jim and The Crowd team decided to develop The Curve, an online platform that would allow companies to share energy investment data.

The future of energy management?

Jim has ambitious goals for The Curve and how it could shape the way big companies deal with sustainability forever. “The same architecture we’re developing would also work for water and if tweaked work for waste” he says.

“We basically see The Curve as a journey to artificial intelligence where companies load up all of the investments they’ve been making across all the different categories of energy management and it [The Curve] knows what they’ve done and what their approval threshold is for their CFO. It’s constantly holding their portfolio against the market, spotting new technologies that have got high star ratings, whether they’ve got paybacks that meet their thresholds, it’s constantly advising companies on new innovations that have come up…. [companies] will be able to remove a lot of that reinvention of the wheel. We believe that if enough companies adopt this global platform it should knock 20% of carbon emissions out of big business simply through sharing knowledge.

Jim argues that the reason many big companies aren’t making the smartest possible energy investments is due to a “big market failure around investment levels which is all linked to knowledge…People just don’t know what technologies are out there, they’re worried about the innovation risk.”

Speaking of The Curve, Jim says “It’s an incredibly unknown area. While there’s a lot of consumer facing platforms, there are very few business to business platforms, mainly because, I think, businesses are very unused to collaborating in this way. It’s a road that’s very uncertain, full of innovation risk… It’s very complicated to set out to build a platform to connect a market that’s predicting user behaviour.

That’s the great unknown for The Curve, which is why we’re doing it on the most collaborative basis we can by working with 50 large companies to develop the content with us. So as much as we can we’re coming in minimal viable propositions and then listening and asking lots of questions to help us work out what is the functionality that would be the most useful to them.”

The Crowd is part of Simpleweb’s small but mighty investment portfolio. We’ll keep you up to date with the latest news from The Crowd here, but if you want to learn more visit thecrowd.me.

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