EVIDENCE

The Unilever Sustainable Living Lab was a live, online, moderated dialogue on sustainable living. The Lab launched at 9am BST on Wednesday 25th April 2012, and ran for 24 hours. It was an invite-only event, timed to coincide with the publication of the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan Progress Report 2011. The Lab was hosted by Unilever and co-developed by GlobeScan and our partner Fenton Communications. The event was facilitated by GlobeScan and our partner SustainAbility, with significant input from 80 invited senior-level guest contributors.

Moderated discussions were held on four topics, with each theme representing a different component of the value chain: Sustainable sourcing; Sustainable production and distribution; Consumer behaviour change; and Recycling and waste.

More than 2,200 thought leaders and experts registered for the Lab, representing 77 countries. Across the four discussion streams, a total of 3,900 posts were made over the 24 hours.

IDEAS

The objectives of the Sustainable Living Lab were to create a space for opinion leaders to give Unilever feedback on the Plan, to co-create leading-edge ideas, and to share best practices with the ultimate aim of helping Unilever and others find solutions to their sustainability challenges.

Some of the ideas from the discussion streams included:

• Positive, aspirational messaging for changing consumer behaviour—such as the ‘Handprint’ calculator
• Companies setting an internal price for water to help prioritize investment in water use efficiency
• Moving from a compliance model to collaboration and capacity building with suppliers—including training on business and sustainability
• Connecting the producers of waste to the places where it can be valued—business models to derive value from putting waste back into the value chain

APPLIED

Over 100 Unilever managers from across the business, from R&D, procurement, marketing, and customer development, participated in the Lab discussions. This was to ensure that the ideas and solutions from the Lab would be turned into action. The Lab generated insights, solutions, and new thinking for all parts of the business that the discussions touched. Over the coming months, many of the lessons of the Lab will be taken back into the business, developed, and shared with Unilever partners and stakeholders.

Read the Highlights Report, a distillation of some of the ideas covered in the Lab.

Select Media Highlights

• How Unilever Crowdsourced Creativity to Meet its Sustainability Goals: GreenBiz (7 June 2012)
• Businesses Pioneering Crowdsourcing to Source Social Innovation: JustMeans (15 May 2012)
• Can Crowdsourcing Really Crack Corporate Sustainability?: The Guardian (24 April 2012)