1. Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi (LinkedIn) is co-founder of consultancy Applied Sustainability after many successful years at Dow Chemicals, including as Global Technology & Sustainability Director. Here she talks about innovation at Dow for sustainability, especially for the Olympics.

This is part of a series of interviews about innovation for sustainability conducted for the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources, as a contribution to a module in this Masters.  You can find out more about these interviews, and the module, here.


Here are the times of each of the questions. 

PERSONAL AND ORGANISATIONAL INTRO

0:50 - Q1. What is your role and organisation? 

ORGANISATIONAL SETTING

1:57 - Q2. What role does your department / function have in the organisation? What is expected from you? How does that connect to the organisation’s strategy?

3:48 - Q3. How is ‘sustainability’ framed in your organisation? (For instance: are there specific key words or phrases? Is it only environmental?)

INNOVATION STORY

08:37 - Q4. Can you tell us the story of a good example of your work on innovation for sustainability?

INNOVATION MANAGEMENT

17:41 - Q5. What are the key methods and practices you use for innovation for sustainability?

23:59 - Q6. What are the biggest challenges you face, and how do you overcome them?

26:02 - Q7. If there was one thing policymakers could do which would make your work significantly easier, what would that be?

THE FUTURE

27:35 - Q8. What are your organisation’s priorities on innovation going forward and why?

This is part of a series of interviews about innovation for sustainability conducted for the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources, as a contribution to a module in this Masters. You can find out more about these interviews, and the module, here.

Transcript

ISR Innov Interview Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi

Wed, 1/19 10:28AM • 29:54

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

sustainability, programme, projects, organisation, technologies, carbon, business, portfolio, partners, innovation, people, emissions, geographies, material, offsetting, dow, carbon credits, ioc, phase, customer

SPEAKERS

David Bent-Hazelwood, 

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi -- LinkedIn

INTRODUCTION

David Bent-Hazelwood  00:16

This is one of several interviews on innovation, business and sustainability for the students studying for the MSc in sustainable resources at UCL. My name is David Bent, and I am an honorary lecturer at the UCL Institute for Sustainable resources, and CO lead on the module, eco innovation and sustainable entrepreneurship. Most of the course gives people the latest academic theory and insights, these 30 minute interviews with practitioners to give some of the grit under the fingernails of innovating for sustainability today. I'm delighted to say we're joined by Nicoletta so the first question, Nicoletta, 

QUESTION 1. what is what has been your orders your organisation? You hear me speaking from today?

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi  00:57

Yeah, well, first of all, David, thank you for including me in this series of interviews. Hello, also to the students who will be listening to this interview, I will draw from a role that I had in my former organisation, I used to work for Dow, I have spent actually most of my career with Dow. And in my more recent role, I was technology and sustainability director for Dallas, Olympic and sports solutions business. I'll also drove from my experiences that had since then, so I retired from Dow in March 2021. And since then, I've set up a consulting company, applied sustainability GmbH. And as the name says, it's about helping make sustainability real. So I'll draw from these two roles as technology and sustainability director and as a co founder of this new venture.

David Bent-Hazelwood  01:52

Great and, and so thinking about those two ones, particularly in the first instance, Dow, 

QUESTION 2. what was what was that role? What did it really mean? in that department?

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi  02:04

Yes. Yeah, so Dow was the partner of the IOC and Olympic Games, so one of the top partners of the Olympic movement. And in that, in that partnership, I was leading the team to implement our technology and sustainability programmes. And specifically, we took on an additional challenge, we became the carbon partner of the Sochi and the Rio Olympic Games, and also of the IOC. So in my role, I was able to oversee the development of this. It was a multi stakeholder engagement programme, and it was also a business sustainability programme. And so that's, that's really what what I want to talk about in this interview also,

David Bent-Hazelwood  02:54

and just for people, I mean, that was a huge company, but not everyone may have come across it. I think of Dow as a chemicals company, 

QUESTION: how would you describe Dow?

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi  03:04

Yeah, it's a leading.

David Bent-Hazelwood  03:06

When you talk about technology and solutions, what sorts of things we're talking about?

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi  03:09

Yeah, it's a leading materials company. And so, you know, materials and chemistry goes in so many different applications. Actually, in general, you can think about really, almost everything that surrounds you as being enabled in one way or the other by chemistry and materials. And so we did a number of projects, actually a total of more than 20 projects under this Partnership Programme, that went from renewable energy to packaging, to agriculture, and to building insulation. So really a very broad spectrum of activities and projects.

David Bent-Hazelwood  03:49

QUESTION 3. And in those, how was sustainability framed, Were there particular keywords was there particular issues, which were included and some others, which were excluded? what was meant by sustainability?

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi  04:02

Yes, well, in general, you know, sustainability in the one now to speak to the material sector in the material sector, sustainability has probably three key components. One is around carbon emissions. The second is about circular economy, or material waste in the environment. And the third component is probably around material safety. And these are all components that that were integrated and are being integrated by most leading material science companies in their sustainability strategies. 

Sustainability is of course, a very broad term, when I now think about, you know, applied sustainability. The company that we have recently founded, we look at it very broadly, we both work on social entrepreneurship, as well as also on material sustainability, climate change and circular economy. And I think what is really very, very important is not only the different organisations identify what their key themes are, but realise the interconnectedness of these different steps.

David Bent-Hazelwood  05:10

And, indeed, and one question back about, I'm particularly interested about how organisations engage with sustainability. Thinking back to that role in Dow. 

QUESTION: How did how did the work you're doing with the IOC? How did that relate to the organisation strategy to what Dow was trying to achieve overall?

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi  05:32

Yes, so, first of all, what we did was something that was very unusual. In the world of sports, typically, a carbon partner to a sport organisation will provide carbon credits that are retired from the existing voluntary carbon market. And these carbon credits will offset the footprint of a mega events such as the Olympic Games, we wanted to break with this tradition and create a business engagement programme. So what we actually did is we wanted to use our own technologies with our customers to initiate new projects, that would lead to co2 reductions. 

So you can already see that the strategy was from the very beginning to put sustainability and to put our materials and our knowledge at the core of the programme. And again, as I said, to create new projects that would catalyse change in the geographies where the happened. And and in order to do that, we had actually to consider to make a whole programme construction around that.

David Bent-Hazelwood  06:43

And let's get to that in a second. But I just want to make sure we, our listeners have understand some of the terms. So and the distinction you're drawing out there. 

So a carbon credit would be where somebody has planted a forest has perhaps made some savings in their own emissions of their power station, whatever it is. And those avoided emissions or those sequestered, emissions become available, something they can sell to somebody else, who is behaving as they were before, they've admitted as they as much as they were going to do anyway. And they just buy the offsets to reduce their the total emissions in the world, even though the data themselves have not changed. That's carbon credits in a nutshell. And instead, what you're talking about is dow working with the IOC and the businesses around the IOC, to actually make direct savings and not to buy savings off of the marketplace. So it's a it's a very engaged and deep difference.

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi  07:41

Yes, it's a lot more a collaboration programme. And I think we can also maybe bring another term in, you know, you talked about offsetting offsetting is very often just about the financial transaction. It's not, it's not a bad thing. It's just complimentary, it needs to be complimentary to business, innovating and bringing technologies to the market that are lead to lower co2 reduction emissions. 

And also another term, maybe inserting where it's people collaborating within the value chain, to reduce emissions. And I think all these three approaches need to be very much complimentary, we need to do all three of them. It's good to find projects that have been done by other people in other geographies, but it also really important to engage your own business community as a business leader.

David Bent-Hazelwood  08:38

So now let's move into your story, which really illustrates the work that I was doing. 

QUESTION 4: So can you tell us about a good example, and I think you were starting with them, the business collaboration, so tell us about what you did. And the beginning, middle and end of what what that was all about?

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi  08:54

Yeah, the story always begins with people it actually began with, you know, the Sochi Olympic Games where, like in many, many sporting events, sustainability requirements get added very often on top of other requirements or as an afterthought, and in this case, you know, offsetting or the or mitigating the footprint of the games was one of the key requirements. And the organisation was really looking for partners that would help them do that. And this was not something that we had thought about beforehand. 

And we had to construct really a whole programme approach, as I said, we had to create a framework that we we had to get third party validated, and also make publicly available to make sure that our approach was considered credible. And then, based on that we then looked at who could be project partners, what kind of technologies would help us achieve our objectives. From from the very beginning, every project had sort of a dual metric, an environmental metric and a business metric. And so we went after these, these very clear guidelines and very clear project requirements to put together a portfolio of activities and projects.

David Bent-Hazelwood  10:23

And so there's almost like two layers to this. 

There's that partnership layer or portfolio where there's the relationship between Dow IOC and other partners. A

nd then there's this second layer of specific projects, which are applying material science, with partners to specific find specific savings. 

And earlier on, you mentioned a couple of different domains that these were in. So what was in packaging, we talked about packaging to agriculture, talked about energy, could you just give us give us a flavour of one or two of those just? What were the technologies? Who were the people, partners we were working with? What was innovative? What was the was there a physical product innovation? was an innovation in the process of getting it to happen? Or was the innovation at the level of how it was managed?

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi  11:12

Okay, these are quite a few questions. 

So let's so the first thing we looked at is actually where do the emissions come from. And I would recommend everybody to think about that if you want to reduce co2 emissions in a specific geography and other projects need to happen locally. Very often, we talk about greenhouse gas emissions at the very abstract, global level. But in order to to find sources for of reduction, you need to think locally. And so we first of all thought about okay, geographies of implementation and where the emissions came from. 

So as we started with the Sochi Olympic Games, it's a cold country. And so insulation was one of the key technologies that we wanted to deploy, of course, we also looked at agriculture, in that context, where local agriculture was one of the the projects that we wanted to implement. So looking at the local emission sources, that's what will determine what kind of technologies you can identify. 

Another criteria that we looked at was the speed of implementation. So you know, just like an athlete needs to, to practice to for the competition. So our team had to also up their their game and make sure they could deliver within a very short timeframe. And so that leads us to partners, when you want to implement something very quickly, the best way to start is with your customers. And so that's really, you know, nothing like that would ever have happened without customers or the existing customer relationships that we could leverage.

David Bent-Hazelwood  13:04

It's, I mean, the students have just been hearing about how different theories of innovation either start with a technology push, or some start with the market demand. But there's another bunch which start with the coupling between the customer and the firm. And that's what you're describing there. That is by knowing what by knowing the customer, knowing what the customer wants, that you're able to find the right technology, or innovate the right technology.

QUESTION: If we take the example of the installation, was that a taking an existing material, and just distributing it differently and putting it into that market? A marketplace, which hadn't been in before at a speed and scale that hadn't been in before? Or was there a need for some technological innovation, some new materials, some new ways of making them that was needed in order to make that to happen?

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi  13:51

By and large, when you want to get things done within a couple of years, you need to tap into existing technologies and existing innovation, or transfer them from from other geographies into this target geography. So and also at the core of this programme was the thinking that actually most of the technologies already exists. We hear this in the recent report by the International Energy Agency in the UN Environment Agency Gap Report, wherever we can read that most of the technologies exist. So why is decarbonisation not happening at a more rapid scale? 

The problem is that a lot of the incentives went to technologies that were not mature enough because the thinking was that technologies that already are at scale should be deployed anyway. Well, they're not because we are all people and and human behaviour is that we like to stay in our comfort zone. And so what we effectively did, we helped our customers, first of all, measure the carbon emissions acts that were not a requirement for their business to actually measure them and demonstrate them and, and verify them. So we help them do that. 

And then the second thing was, we yeah, we helped them put that metric as part of the projects, and provide them provided them also the marketing opportunity to talk about this technologies and the programme that they had implemented together. So it was very much using existing technologies, accelerating the implementation, putting the carbon metrics into the mix, and providing the marketing platform to share success and also failures to a certain extent. Yeah.

David Bent-Hazelwood  15:51

And I think one of the key points there just to reiterate, people often split the innovation process into different phases, there's a pure invention phase of often in universities or in labs coming up with the material that goes into the installation. There's an innovation phase, which makes that something which is ready to be commercialised, and then there's the selling and commercialising and the constant improvement phase. 

And what you're talking about there is just because a technology is ready on the shelf, it's made its way to the end of that innovation phase does not mean that it will get scaled. And in order to scale it, there's actually a way to defuse it and have it adopted, there's an awful lot of work that needs to be done there. for lots of reasons, including it needs to displace its competitors, it needs to get people to pay attention to it, who have lots of other things on their mind that they're busy with other things in their lives. You need to have distribution channels and ways in which it gets physically put into the walls in the case of installation, what none of which currently exists that distribution channel. So it's a just because the widget is there does not mean that it'll magically suddenly get everywhere, we're all spread around the world. And so,

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi  17:01

exactly, yes, in fact, I want to add one more than that mentioned, we actually even communicated to homeowners, that by improving insulation of their windows, through an insulation foam, they could reduce co2 emissions, indicating, you know, different sources that we had used the references for this for this work, and so on, and how that would help mitigate the carbon impacts of the Sochi Olympic Games. So even the communication to the home owners and to the end user is something that we brought into some of these projects depending on the project of course,

David Bent-Hazelwood  17:41

sure. 

QUESTION 5: So then let's move bit into the methods and practices as well their particular ways particular methods, particular frameworks, the use around pivoting sustainability, whether at the level of an individual product or the level of the portfolio, and to make sure that you're doing the right thing.

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi  18:00

Yeah, so, I want to talk maybe about two things here. 

One in general in r&d and and materials company, you know, there are a number of there is always a process a Stage Gate process that is being used and and you know, I don't want to go into mentioning that the names of this stage gate processes, because every organisation has their favourite one, but in general, it is about the discovery phase, the scoping phase, then then you you do a kind of feasibility study or proof of concept and so on, then you go into development and preparing and then go you go into scaling and preparing the launch and then you go into fourth implementation, and these are typically Stage Gate processes. That means, you know, there are there are clear deliverables after every one of this stage, in order to be able to move on, there are criteria that need to be taken in activities that need to be covered in every stage and there are more, there are cross functional teams that work to develop this technology and to go through the process and also cross functional steering teams evaluate the progress, I think that you know, coming from a process and a manufacturing environment, this is really ingrained in the culture of these organisations very often. Now for

David Bent-Hazelwood  19:23

our before, second one, just to land for people. When we talk about a Stage Gate process, the stages you described as those different phases. The gate part of the name has to do with if it doesn't reach a particular hurdle, if it don't isn't good enough because of either on a physical level or on it doesn't function well enough, its quality isn't good enough, or it looks like it's gonna be too expensive. Then it fails to get through the gate. And it might get another go at that phase or it might just get killed as a project. That's that's the reason for having a gate.

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi  19:56

Exactly. And unfortunately, sometimes projects Don't get killed fast enough. You know, that's another topic of property for for our other other session, I think it's important that that they do get killed when they need to get killed, and also that we learn from failures. So, failure is, is a virtue in my eyes to a certain extent. And that's something that we all saw. 

Now I want to talk about the programme approach and, and what kind of process we used for that it was different, as we have already explained, it was about application of existing technologies, and adding this carbon dimension to all of these technologies. And so we leveraged a lot of the processes from the voluntary carbon market. So there are different methodologies there to it's about evaluating a project potential first. So we said what kind of we already talked about, where do emissions come from, what kind of technologies could be relevant for Brazil, for Russia, for Asia, and therefore, identifying Project Opportunity potentials, based also on the project portfolio, the technology portfolio that we brought, then we selected a specific standard or a framework, which was in our case, we had created our own framework, then we selected also, the auditor, or the partners to bring in the expert partners, we had both an auditor as well as some carbon experts from different organisations. 

And then we started to identify project implementation activities. And and from there, we sort of develop the project, which mean we wins, we executed the project implementation activities, and then at the end, verified the results. And also, in this case, there were different stages. And we engage very much with our partner, in this case, the IOC or the Rio Olympic Games, or the Sochi Olympic Games, to verify the progress throughout this stages. So we would, we would show our portfolio of project opportunities, select certain ones, move forward with them, get approval for that. 

And so take it take the projects through the different stages, what I want to say is, it's really important that you manage your portfolio. Not every project is going to be successful. And that, again, comes comes in we have to learn from our failures. But we have to have a robust enough approach that the portfolio can can accept a certain failure rate.

David Bent-Hazelwood  22:40

And across the portfolio, did you have a like a skewed? Did you have a few big but risky projects? And then lots of small, but certain ones that was there a way in which you had to manage the composition of the

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi  22:53

Yes, yes. So we were we had some core technologies, I would say, and also we did use carbon credits, to help us balance the risk. Yeah. So when, when when talking about a very public event, you need to make sure that you can deliver things early on. So carbon credits are existing emission reduction sources. And in targeted intervention, we use them to balance out the portfolio also, because it is that the business as usual, it was not our preference, but it was the business as usual. Hence, we we blended, they had a blended portfolio that contained certain offsetting projects.

David Bent-Hazelwood  23:45

And that was a way of having a by having those low risk, when you need a very, you're very relatively certain that they would deliver that allows you to take more risk on the other projects that you were doing. And therefore, that's what we mean by a blended or balanced portfolio there. Moving on to our last few questions. 

QUESTION 6. What's the biggest challenges you faced? And how did you overcome them?

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi  24:09

I would say the biggest challenge was that it was not business as usual. You know, business, as usual, looked very different. We were effectively trying to compete with the voluntary carbon market with a different approach. It's it's all in the voluntary space. So that helped us to make sure that we could probably do that. But we wanted to make sure we bring we this approach was seen as complimentary. 

That was also one of the other reasons why, for instance, some of the projects, we would go through all the phases to register carbon credit to show that they had the same level of credibility. And on the other hand, that's why we brought some of the voluntary carbon market mechanisms into the programme. So you Having to go beyond business as usual was, I would say, the biggest hurdle. 

The second was also sometimes overcoming internal barriers, the way I always like to think in order to get to overcome sometimes internal barriers, the best thing to do is to bring your customer in and to make your customer excited. So whenever you implement an approach, a sort of multi stakeholder collaboration programme, bring the customer to the table straightaway. 

And then the third piece was really to help people understand the connection to the, to the core of what the company does, indeed, which is materials. So make your your initiative really core to what you do and not something that has no connection with your own strategy. Like it needs to be really core to your strategy in order to be able to execute it.

David Bent-Hazelwood  26:02

Great. 

QUESTION 7: And if there's one thing policymakers could do that would make your work easier, or have a larger return, what would it be? What would you ask from the governments and policymakers?

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi  26:16

Well, I think in the end, we have been asking for a global price on carbon, or I personally, you know, for a long time, I think we need to have more clarity. Today, only 25% of the global emissions are covered by a price on carbon, we need to have more clarity, we cannot expect things to happen really at a big scale, unless there is a price on carbon, whatever that means, in the differentials, diction. So that would be my one asked.

David Bent-Hazelwood  26:49

I think we'll, for the students, they'll cover some of that. And also, I mean, I would absolutely agree we need strong incentives for carbon reducing the amount of carbon in the economy. And prices are one of the mechanisms to have that, that those incentives and having a global consistent carbon price meeting politically, very challenging at the moment. So we may have to end up with a patchwork quilt of different policy responses to getting an innovation, getting the incentives in place. And then finally,

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi  27:19

I just want to say I fully agree with you. I mean, when I when I talk about a price on carbon, it's really whatever that means in the different jurisdictions. But we need to have more coverage. Otherwise, you know, we will not be able to scale the technologies that we need.

David Bent-Hazelwood  27:35

QUESSTION 8: And finally the future, what are the priorities, particularly thinking about innovation for sustainability? What are your clients is going forward?

Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi  27:43

Well, what I see is that the interconnectedness of the different issues is really important to understand, we tend to work on one issue at a time, and and that is going to come back to haunt us. It's like a multi headed monster, you know, if you, if you work on that one head, there will be another head that raises it comes up. 

And so I think helping companies understand the mood, the interconnectedness of different issues, is one of my key priorities. The second one is recognising that every buddy has a different pathway to sustainability, because they have a different point of departure. And so it's very difficult to just copy paste things, the pathway to becoming more sustainable, is very much specific to the organisation. 

So making sure people understand that and helping them achieve that. And and then, you know, making sure we up our ambition, you know, that was, for me, a key success factor of this whole programme that I have, it described that we had a very public commitment, we had a very significant commitment. And, and so I think that's, that's something that, that and having this commitment actually creates a lot of alignment. If you have an incremental goal, it does not create alignment across the organisation. But if you really give people goals that are very significant that where they say we can't do this with our current business, we need to find new partners for that, that helps them really to think outside their business as usual.

David Bent-Hazelwood  29:28

Wonderful. And that is a fantastic thing for us to end on there about the need for how heightened ambition can create place and excitement and alignment across the organisation and actually be better than an incremental version. Thank you very much, Nicoletta. It's been a pleasure talking to you. And the interview series will continue but thank you very much. Thank you