Tell us a little bit about you and your company.
I’m Vita, the Innovation Manager at STEAMhouse. I am responsible for supporting academic communities, SMEs and organisations, merging creativity with commerce by analysing, exploring, and experimenting to create innovative processes, concepts and solutions. As a company, we are on a mission to enable innovation through collaboration. We’re a supportive community and space where entrepreneurs, students, businesses, and organisations co-exist to solve real-world problems and develop new ideas.
What initiatives are your company taking to help businesses implement sustainable and circular practices?
Our ambition is to be planet centred, with a focus on people. We know a huge barrier is behavioural change, both in terms of consumers and the internal culture of businesses and organisations. We’re really interested to see how we can utilise people as a force for positive change, and how we can empower and skill-up people to take a planet centred approach to the design of new products and services. We also think that creativity and experimentation is essential in driving the change we need, so we are doing a lot of work in how we utilise waste and develop new materials as a result. We combine this with practical tools and methods to demonstrate how we can break the cycle of non-renewable consumption before it begins, embedding circular principles into the fabric of our business models and creative practices.
Can you give a few examples of what you are implementing to help achieve a more sustainable and circular economy?
Our Materials Club provides an experimental space for the development of new materials which utilise waste as a valuable resource. We think it’s important to harness open innovation as a vehicle for change and that it takes all types of minds, skills and businesses to work together to develop solutions for the knotty problems that sustainability provides. Our STEAM Challenge Events and open innovation challenge programmes bring together diverse minds who are involved in and affected by problems, who supported by our innovation tools and methods, work collectively to find solutions.
What are your top 5 tips for people who want to adopt sustainable practices?
1 . You’ll spend most of your time influencing not necessarily ‘doing’. You need to be comfortable with knowing that sometimes it’ll work as you want it to and other times it won’t.
2 . Progress is slow, but micro changes can have the biggest impact. If you’re only in it for big wins, then you’re likely to be disappointed.
3 . There’s no perfect solution, there will always be consequences to change and that’s ok.
4 . It can feel like a bit of a pandoras box: muddy and, if you’re not careful, disheartening. You have to focus on what you can reasonably do.
5 . Reframe and rethink sustainability as a multi-faceted force for good. Sustainability isn’t just another thing to do. It’s a fundamental driving force in any businesses or organisation who want to succeed.
