Stick and Carrot

At the Road to Zero Carbon seminar last week, there was much debate about why ‘green homes’ are not valued more highly. “They don’t get it” was a phrase I heard more than once from the floor. “They” of course, are the people who want to buy a home and the banks that lend them the money to do so.

So it’s good to see the Zero Carbon Hub championing “A Marketing Strategy for New Homes” http://bit.ly/9T1EzS

“Develop a national new homes marketing campaign to stimulate customer demand for low and zero carbon homes and move them from the ‘exemplar’ to the ‘mainstream’”.

However, the need to cut through the ‘green wash’ and provide clear information on performance, cost in use and durability must not be lost in some sort of manifesto. People do ‘get’ good design and lenders value it appropriately.

“The report also recommends a change of language in how the industry communicates low and zero carbon homes.  Consumers are switched off by zero carbon homes but switched on by homes that are built to better performance standards and are therefore cheaper to run.”

The challenge for the industry is to continue to innovate and deliver that performance in a consistent, reliable and affordable way. But we need creative lenders too (a worrying concept on recent form). Energy Performance Certificates (EPC) are a positive indicator of value. Might lenders place greater emphasis on EPC’s when considering the loan to value ratio?

From a marketing perspective, strong brands will no doubt win. It will be interesting to see whether the more brand savvy, customer focussed lenders - Virgin Money, TESCO Bank, et al, take up the challenge. And how they connect with their potential supply chain, the volume house builders. And where are the good old Mutual Building Societies and Cooperative Societies in all this?

Great design is collaborative and the challenges we face need innovative solutions.

Particularly while the politicos play ‘wiff waff’ with science.

From fundi to jugaad: Indian innovation

Working in Kenya last year, I became aware of the significant role of the fundi in African engineering. Rather like Scotty on the Enterprise, the fundi's role is to improvise and to squeeze performance from materials or mechanical processes whose original function may be long past, yet with imagination, skill and dexterity can be modified for current needs.

A Swahili word, it is also used in South Africa to mean an expert, umfindisi in Nguni and meaning a teacher.

So I was interested to read in Business Week http://bit.ly/6qEw1M of an Indian concept of inexpensive invention that is finding favour in American boardrooms. Navi Radjou from Cambridge University's Centre for India & Global Business, uses a Hindi slang word, jugaad (pronounced "joo-gaardh"), to describe "an improvisational style of innovation that's driven by scarce resources and attention to a customer's immediate needs, not their lifestyle wants."

Held up as a new management fad that resonates with our times, jugaad nevertheless has potential pitfalls if quality and durability are sacrificed in pursuit of a quick fix - particularly in the context of the built environment. The process of innovation need not be complex, but for real value to be added it must generate products that are robust and enduring to be truly sustainable.

"More speed Scotty", but less haste...