ABSTRACT
Innovating for sustainability brings with it exciting opportunities for businesses to help grow their top-line sales and even evolve and transform their business models – indeed, their entire company – to better compete within the rules of a more sustainable. Eco-design and eco-innovation share a worthy goal: minimizing environmental impact. Digital media represents untold opportunity for eco-innovation by replacing material products with electronic services with superior performance. And the environmental benefits of using e-readers to read electronic books are compelling: the Cleantech Group projects that in 2012, 5. 27 billion kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions will be prevented due by ebooks. By combining various elements of the toothbrush product system, Soladey has created a streamlined system with the potential for significantly reduced environmental impact. There are three ways to change a product’s system in order to minimize its environmental impact: changing the elements in a product system, dematerializing the product, and creating a new product system.
