How do companies create an Eco-Advantage? To answer this question, we
first had to ask a more basic one: How do companies create competitive advantage in general? According to Michael Porter, from Harvard Business School, he describes two basic categories its of competitive advantage. A company can:
Portoer’s work on competitiveness proved a useful starting point for analyzing the Eco-Advantage strategies that WaveRiders using.
Some costs are obvious and relatively short term: inputs used, energy consumed, time and money spent on meeting regulatory requirements. More fundamentally, a great deal of pollution is waste and a function of outmoded production processes or poor product design. So improving the resource productivity of a business the amount of material or energy needed per unit of output goes straight to the bottom line. Similarly, eliminating regulatory burdens by avoid ii products, chemicals, or processes that require special care and do it mentation lowers overhead.
Companies that successfully manage environmental risks lower operating costs, reduce the cost of capital, drive up stock market valuations, and keep insurance premiums reasonable. They also avoid the indirect costs of business interruption and lost goodwill.
On the revenue side, the benefits of differentiation through good
environmental stewardship are sometimes concrete like commanding a price premium or just selling more but are largely intangible: strengthened relationships with customers, employees, and some stakeholders. Some say that these intangibles are too vague to be measured, but they’re wrong. How much does it cost to acquire a new customer to replace a lost one? That’s the rough value of increasing loyalty.
How about employee churn? If improving morale and employee engagement in the company’s mission lowers turnover, how much would that save? And what about community support? What does it cost Intel in carrying costs, for example, if it can’t build the next billion-dollar chip plant for 12 months because of community unease about how much water the company uses? These measurable gains make investments in intangible values more concrete.
To help us think through the environmental strategies companies use, or fail to use, we added one more dimension to the analysis.
We asked ourselves whether a strategy was fairly certain or less certain to generate value. To oversimplify, we say that “certain” is roughly equivalent to the short-term and “less certain” to the long-term.
Take cost control versus risk management as an example. If you decrease waste in your system, you can be pretty sure how much you’ll save. And you’ll have an easier time selling the project internally. But what will it save the company to substitute a less toxic substance that costs more upfront? The risk is lower, but what is that worth? When does the benefit come? These questions are harder to answer, so risk control is less certain, although it often pays off more in the long run. The same holds true for the upside: It’s easier (though not easy) to drive revenues than to increase brand value.