How can you use social innovation to improve your company's water management strategy?

I see social innovation as a way for society to follow its process of evolution, based on mechanisms of social relationships, collusion and projection of a collective future. Considering the dynamic changes in today's increasingly rapid society, social innovation enables balance between people.

Social innovation at its most powerful, is a new narrative or re-frame that can cultivate a paradigm shift in behavior and a vision that can collectively take an entire civilization to a new future.

Trazer as comunidades para dentro do processo de entendimento dos problemas e construções de soluções é o princípio por tras da Inovação Social. Com isso buscamos agregar valor através da co-criação com alavanças de valor que fazem parte do dia-a-dia das pessoas envolvidas.

Community Engagement: Involve locals in conservation, promoting awareness and shared responsibility. Partnerships: Collaborate with NGOs, local authorities and groups. Education Initiatives: Develop programs for employees and communities. Tech Integration: Use innovative water-monitoring tech to enhance efficiency and reduce waste. Inclusive Decision-Making: Involve diverse stakeholders for a comprehensive understanding of local water challenges. Social Impact Projects: Implement initiatives like clean water access or infrastructure development. Employee Involvement: Encourage staff to contribute ideas. Transparency: Communicate openly about strategies, highlighting social and environmental impacts, seek improvement feedback.

Of all the businesses that exist, it is the “bulk water entities”, those businesses that are responsible for delivering pipes fresh water to consumers, that are pivotal to the entire context in which its customers think about and frame their entire water management strategies. In the current, and soon to be superseded, “sustainability as normal” era, water is perceived as a product and factor of production, and its management framed in terms of eco-efficiency and resource use minimization. However, in the emerging “integral age” we are seeing water being understood as an “eco-service”, where synergy and shared benefits replace simplistic input-output thinking.

A água como um bem necessário para todo tipo de processo de transformação industrial deve ser tratada com todo cuidado, pois, dela dependem toda a cadeia de valor fora das industria. Na verdade a água é, primeiramente, um bem indispensável ao ser humano e por isso as industrias precisar zelar pelo correto uso, destinação e reposição desse bem. Tratamentos de efluentes e água devem ser vistos sempre como investimento pelas empresas e não apenas como uma obrigação ambiental passível de multas.

If businesses are to extend the boundaries of their water problem solving to include all stakeholders they will also need to cultivate and strengthen social connections and compelling shared value propositions. Where shared eco-service opportunities are identified, for example in the vein of “industrial ecology”, where outputs are valued as inputs within realistic geographical locations. However, mutually beneficial outcomes can ensue, only where barriers to cooperation are overcome. This latter point is also a critical reason to encourage radical social innovation to enable such barriers to be dissolved.

There is an important strategy for both WSUD and Bulk Water Entities (a name for the public or private body/utility responsible for providing fresh water to the area (i.e. city or region). This strategy presents a win win for both developers, existing property owners and water utilities. It involves the construction of rain and surface stormwater harvesting, with both funding and sometimes access to use, from the utility. The rational for this strategy is that it can lower and defer the marginal cost of water supply capacity increase, which can often be over the $bn mark, ie for dam wall raising or desalination plants; which is far more costly than distributed water conservation and site water storage solutions.

Whilst working with a large Bulk Water Entity to implement radical sustainability as business improvement strategy, we noted that over 90% of operational and capital expenditure was limited to the treatment and delivery function, with almost no investment on the water catchment and the stakeholders who either lived or operated businesses within the water catchment area. It was found that by engaging with these stakeholders it was possible to improve the value of their assets, improve water infiltration, reduce soil erosion, and improve water quality which resulted in reduction in downstream processing/purification costs. The next phase was to focus on downstream customers to reposition them from consumers to prosumers

– A radical re-frame is required. Applying recently developed Nature Positive assessment tools, for example LCBA (life cycle benefit analysis – ref Evah Institute and Ecquate for some of the world’s largest inventories) will revolutionize this industry. By shifting the investment and innovation energy from slowing down depletion in water quality, eutrophication, and water table capacity, to increasing health in riparian, benthos, aquatic and terrestrial habitats, will create not only net positive gains for the entire Bulk Water Entity asset base, but in a myriad of nature-based services and stakeholders that share this environment.