Peter Fisk

Today, Skanska is the fifth-largest construction company in the world, using knowledge and foresight to shape the way people live, work, and connect. More than 135 years in the making, it operates across the Nordics, Europe and the United States.

T32,000 employees, work collaboratively with customers, seeking to create innovative and sustainable construction solutions that support healthy living beyond our lifetime.

Here are some examples of Skanska’s innovation initiatives:

• Digitalization and Building Information Modeling (BIM): Skanska has been at the forefront of leveraging digital technologies and BIM in construction projects. They utilize BIM to enhance collaboration, improve project visualization, identify clashes and conflicts, and optimize construction processes. Skanska also explores emerging technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to further enhance design and construction workflows.
• Sustainability and Green Building Solutions: Skanska is dedicated to developing sustainable and environmentally-friendly construction solutions. They actively pursue green building certifications, such as LEED and BREEAM, and implement sustainable practices throughout their projects. Skanska explores innovative approaches like energy-efficient designs, renewable energy integration, and the use of sustainable materials to reduce environmental impact.
• Off-Site Construction and Modularization: Skanska embraces off-site construction and modularization techniques to improve construction efficiency and quality. They leverage advanced manufacturing processes and digital tools to prefabricate building components off-site. This approach reduces construction time, minimizes waste, and enhances quality control.
• Safety and Health Innovations: Skanska prioritizes safety and health in their construction projects and actively seeks innovative solutions to improve worker safety. They implement advanced safety practices, including the use of wearable technology, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, and data analytics to monitor and mitigate safety risks. Skanska also invests in employee wellness programs and training initiatives to promote a culture of safety.
• Collaboration and Open Innovation: Skanska actively collaborates with external partners, including startups, universities, and research institutions, to foster open innovation in the construction industry. They engage in partnerships and innovation challenges to explore new technologies, methods, and materials that can drive positive change and improve project outcomes.
• Skanska Innovation Center: Skanska operates its own Skanska Innovation Center, which serves as a hub for research, development, and testing of new ideas and technologies. The center focuses on areas such as digitalization, sustainability, and construction process optimization, fostering a culture of innovation within the company.

Skanska has made sustainability a core part of its business strategy and has been recognized for its commitment to environmentally-friendly practices and sustainable building solutions.

• Green Building Expertise: Skanska has extensive experience in constructing green buildings that meet or exceed various sustainability standards, such as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) and BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method). They have successfully delivered numerous sustainable projects worldwide.
• Environmental Focus: Skanska places a strong emphasis on minimizing the environmental impact of construction activities. They have implemented initiatives to reduce energy consumption, water usage, and waste generation on their construction sites. Skanska also promotes the use of renewable energy sources in their projects.
• Carbon Footprint Reduction: Skanska is committed to reducing carbon emissions from its construction operations. They have set ambitious targets to decrease carbon emissions from their own operations and to work with suppliers and subcontractors to achieve carbon neutrality. Skanska actively explores innovative construction techniques and materials to achieve this goal.
• Sustainable Materials and Technologies: Skanska emphasizes the use of sustainable and environmentally friendly materials in their construction projects. They actively seek out alternatives to traditional construction materials, such as recycled or low-carbon materials. Skanska also integrates innovative technologies, such as energy-efficient systems and smart building solutions, to enhance sustainability performance.
• Stakeholder Engagement and Collaboration: Skanska engages with stakeholders, including clients, suppliers, and local communities, to promote sustainable practices throughout the construction process. They collaborate with partners to develop innovative solutions and share best practices for sustainable construction.
• Reporting and Transparency: Skanska is committed to transparency and regularly reports on its sustainability performance. They provide detailed information on their environmental and social initiatives, including progress towards sustainability goals and key performance indicators.

Skanska’s dedication to sustainability has earned them recognition and accolades in the construction industry. They have received numerous sustainability awards and have been included in prestigious sustainability indices, such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and the FTSE4Good Index.

Today Henkel operates worldwide with leading innovations, brands and technologies in two business areas: Adhesive Technologies and Consumer Brands.

The company holds leading positions with its two business units in both industrial and consumer businesses thanks to strong brands, innovations and technologies such as Persil, Schwarzkopf and Loctite. Henkel, headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany, and is one of the most internationally aligned German companies in the global marketplace.

Henkel’s purpose is to be “pioneers at heart for the good of generations”.

It describes its organisation as a diverse team of more than 50,000 colleagues worldwide, striving to enrich and improve life every day through our products, services, and solutions.

Some of Henkel’s best known brands include Loctite, Pritt, Schwarzkopf and Persil. (Persil is separately marketed by Unilever is some markets – including the UK, France, China, Australia and most of Latin America, under a license deal in 1931).

Holcim was founded by Adolf Gygi in 1912 as “Aargauische Portlandcementfabrik Holderbank-Wildegg”. The original headquarters were in Holderbank, Switzerland. In 1914, the company merged with “Rheintalischen Cementfabrik Rüthi” owned by Ernst Schmidheiny. Schmidheiny took over leadership duties and began the company on a course of expansion.

The company expanded into France and then throughout Europe and Middle East during the 1920s. They expanded in the Americas during the 1950s and went public in 1958. The company continued to expand in Latin America and added Asian divisions during the 1970s and 1980s. A series of mergers and buyouts made Holcim one of the two largest cement manufacturers worldwide by 2014, roughly tied with rival Lafarge. In April 2014, the two companies agreed to a US$60 billion “merger of equals”.

Holcim merged with Lafarge on 10 July 2015 to form LafargeHolcim as the new company and renamed to Holcim Group in 2021. When the merger was completed, the Holcim brand remain active within the group.

The Zug-based company now operates in over 70 countries and has a strong presence in Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. The company’s products are used in various construction projects, including residential, commercial, industrial, and infrastructure developments.

Over the years, Holcim has expanded its operations through mergers and acquisitions. In 2015, Holcim merged with the French cement company Lafarge to form LafargeHolcim, creating a global leader in the building materials industry.

Holcim’s purpose is to build progress for people and the planet. We set rigorous science-based targets to meet our net-zero and circular construction goals.

The “Accelerating Green Growth” strategy seeks to transform Holcim into the global leader in innovative and sustainable building solutions.

It is repositioning our business towards more dynamic end-markets (e.g. the United States) where green stimulus and renovation requirements are creating a growing demand for building solutions that help customers achieve ambitious sustainability targets.

It is also shifting its portfolio towards solutions and products, a lightside segment that offers above-market growth, strong pricing power and lower cyclicality, and which will make up over 30% of Holcim’s net sales by 2025.

14Trees, a LafargeHolcim joint venture with the UK’s publicly funded impact-investor CDC Group, is deploying 3D printing technology in Africa, to build affordable and low-carbon housing and schools in Malawi. Pioneering this technology in schools for the first time, 14Trees aims to address the country’s chronic infrastructure shortage while creating skilled local jobs. With its optimized material use, this technology enables the reduction of new homes’ carbon footprint by up to 70%.

Roblox was created by co-founders David Baszucki and Erik Cassel in 2004 under the name DynaBlocks.  Baszucki started testing the first demos that year. In 2005, the company changed its name to Roblox, and it officially launched in 2006. Soon after it released a premium membership service named “Builders Club”.

In December 2011, Roblox held its first Hack Week, an annual event where Roblox developers work on outside-the-box ideas for new developments to present to the company. In 2013, Roblox released its Developer Exchange program, allowing developers to exchange Robux earned from their games into real-world currencies.

Twelve is a chemical technology company based in Berkeley, California. They develop technology to convert CO₂ into profitable chemicals, such as plastics and transportation fuels. Currently, the company uses metal catalysts to produce synthetic gas (syngas), methane, and ethylene.

Originally launched under the name Obtainium in 2014, and later known as Opus 12, Twelve was officially founded in 2015 by Dr. Kendra Kuhl, Dr. Etosha Cave, and Nicholas Flanders.

The company was part of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s first Cyclotron Road cohort, an incubator program that aids in the creation of environmentally beneficial companies. Since then, it has won multiple awards including the Keeling Curve prize, Ocean Exchange’s WW Orcelle award, the Roddenberry prize,  and Forbes’ Change the World competition.

In 2021, Twelve received $57 million in series A funding,  the company has also received funding through SBIR grants for projects involving CO₂ conversion. This includes generating products such as carbon monoxide, polyethylene, ethanol, ethylene, methane, and jet fuel.

Nicholas Flanders describes the company’s technology as “industrial photosynthesis” to create jet fuel and diesel from carbon dioxide. Their technology has been shown to convert CO₂ from raw biogas into carbon neutral methane.

Twelve utilizes polymer electrolyte membrane electrolysis, which splits apart water molecules into its component pieces (O₂, electrons, and hydrogen ions) via the application of electricity. By adding a catalyst to the cathode, they are able to split up CO₂ into CO and O₂ 

In February 2020, Twelve partnered with Mercedes and Trinseo to create the world’s first C–pillar made with polycarbonate from CO₂ electrolysis.

In June 2020, the company partnered with SoCalGas and PG&E to advance their technology for use with CO₂ present in biogas, which comes from sources such as landfills, sewage, and dairy farms. This gas, produced by the anaerobic breakdown of wastes, contains roughly 60% methane and 40% CO₂; testing is being performed with the goal of achieving high conversion efficiency for long periods of time.

In September 2021 Twelve partnered with LanzaTech to create polypropylene, a commonly used plastic which is traditionally produced from fossil fuels; this is the first time that polypropylene was made from CO₂.

Twelve plans to scale up their technology to an industrial-sized shipping container, which would enable them to produce larger quantities of product.

Global awareness of the plastic packaging problem has reached record levels in recent years and the search for a true sustainable alternative is ongoing. Could the solution lie in the seas? London-based start-up Notpla, founded by Pierre Paslier and Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez, believe so.

Just 9% of all the plastic ever produced has been recycled and 12% has been incinerated. The rest lies in landfills or has been dumped into the oceans. Notpla is an alternative to plastic made from seaweed and plants.

It is always totally natural and entirely biodegradable, and can be used to create a range of packaging products, such as a bubble to hold liquids, a coating for food containers, and a paper for the cosmetic and fashion industry.

NotPla co-founders, Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez and Pierre Paslier, met while studying Innovation Design Engineering at Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art.

After their first video of an edible bubble encapsulating water went viral, they collaborated with chemists and chemical engineers from Imperial College to develop their first product, Ooho.

In 2019 the brand Notpla was born, an abbreviation of ‘not plastic’, accompanied by an identity and brand strategy that better represents our mission and values and positions us as an environmental sustainability leader.

“Fourteen million tonnes of plastic enter our oceans each year. We founded Notpla when we discovered the solution lies in our oceans too. We are already replacing plastic that plagues our seas, and working with seaweed farms that give back to the environment and the local economy. Thank you for recognising us as we take our next big step and eliminate single-use plastic for good!” say Co-Founder & CEO, Pierre Paslier

Notpla partnered with Lucozade to replace single-use plastic cups and bottles with 36,000 Ooho at the London Marathon. They also worked with Just Eat to launch a food container coated with seaweed, a revolutionary move for the takeaway industry that has traditionally relied on plastic or chemicals to hold food.

In 2022 Notpla won the Earthshot Prize 2022, presented by Prince William at a global ceremony in New York, in the category of “Build a Waste-Free World”.

The company was founded by Nicolas Mermoud and Jean-Luc Diard, former Salomon employees, in 2009, when they sought to design a shoe that allowed them to run downhill faster, and created a model with an oversized outsole that had more cushion than other running shoes at the time.

The shoes are named after the Māori language phrase loosely meaning “fly over the earth”.

The shoes were initially embraced by ultramarathon runners due to their enhanced cushion and inherent stability; however, they quickly gained popularity among other runners for offering maximum cushion and minimal weight. The brand’s original, highest-cushion models are now accompanied in the Hoka lineup by lighter-weight shoes that retain much of the brand’s signature cushion, and even lightweight training, and racing shoes, and track spikes.

Hoka was acquired in 2013 by Deckers Brands, the parent company for UGG, Teva and other footwear brands.

The company sponsors a variety of professional runners; its first athletes were primarily trail-ultra runners, but their roster has expanded to include several track & field, triathlon, and road-running athletes. Hoka also has long-term sponsorship deals with the professional training groups Northern Arizona Elite, based in Flagstaff, Arizona; and the California-based Aggies Running Club. Hoka is also the former sponsor of the New Jersey New York Track Club.

Fast Company recently ranked the brand as one of the world’s most innovative companies saying “Amid the increasingly crowded market for technically advanced running shoes, Hoka is outpacing its competitors.”

In 2022, Deckers reported that Hoka’s sales had grown 30% year-over-year for the most recent quarter (fiscal Q3 2022), from $142 million to $185 million; in the previous quarter, Hoka’s net sales grew 47% year-over-year, from $143 million to $210 million. For fiscal year 2021 (which ended March 31, 2021), net sales increased 62.0% to $571.2 million.

What’s driving this growth is Hoka’s commitment to delivering innovations that keep athletes—amateurs and pros alike—running faster and more comfortably. Hoka is known for developing a new kind of EVA foam that’s extra soft and lightweight, and molded into a rocker shape that helps propel runners forward.

Last year, Hoka built on this EVA foam base by embedding its popular Bondi shoe with a stiff, carbon-​fiber plate that puts a literal spring in runners’ steps. Called the Bondi X, the shoe was well-reviewed by leading running publications for delivering the pro-grade advantages of a carbon-fiber plate without sacrificing Hoka’s renowned ultra-cushiony comfort. Hoka closed out the year by imbuing a trail runner shoe, the Tecton X, with a pair of carbon-fiber plates that are aimed at giving wearers extra propulsion with the added stability that off-piste runners require. (Hoka also improved on its popular Rincon and Clifton models of shoes in 2021.)

As Hoka expands globally, it’s moving beyond its traditional base of running-shoe retailers to create its own stores. It recently opened pop-ins in New York and Los Angeles, featuring 3D foot-scanning technology and smart lockers, as well as the brand’s first owned and operated stores in China. All of these stores also feature the brand’s growing apparel line, which will be a focus for Hoka in the coming months.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtW0tJeceLI

Mike Cessario is  a graphic designer, and a former Netflix creative director, who was inspired to create Liquid Death after watching a Vans Warped Tour in 2009, in which concert goers would drink water out of Monster Energy cans to stay hydrated. Cessario said he wondered why no one had marketed water in a manner similar to Monster. 

The company started out with Cessario and three other partners, including a bartender and an artist. Before he and his partners chose the name Liquid Death, they thought over different names for the company such as “Southern Thunder”.

Cessario filed a trademark application for the term “Liquid Death” in 2017 and produced a video advertisement to gauge market interest in the product, which received three million views before the water was available to consumers for purchase. Within a few months of release, the company had over 100,000 “likes” on Facebook, more than brands such as Aquafina had generated in their history.

In 2019, Cessario said the company’s plan was to expand to bars, tattoo parlors, and certain barber shops in Los Angeles and Philadelphia as a “lifestyle play”. His idea was that the brand was initially marketed towards straight edge adherents and fans of heavy metal music and punk rock. The drink began selling online, direct to consumers in 2019. 

In 2020, the brand expanded into Whole Foods Market in USA where according to Eater it became “the fastest-selling water brand on its shelves”. It then expanded into two hundred 7-Eleven stores in the Los Angeles and San Diego markets as part of a trial run.

A year later gained funding from Live Nation, the stadium events organiser, who said they would sell the drink exclusively in their events and venues for a period of time. In 2021 the company’s revenue rose to $45 million, and in 2022 it was valued at $525 million.

Liquid Death also released Greatest Hates, an album of death metal music created with lyrics from hate comments the company received online; a second album of hate comments, described as “punk rock”, was released. In 2022, during Super Bowl LVI, the company released an advertisement featuring children enjoying the beverage with Judas Priest’s song “Breaking the Law”. Parodying advertisements for alcoholic beverages, the advertisement ends with the tagline – “Don’t be scared, it’s just water”.

 

Schneider Electric specialises in digital automation and energy management addressing homes, buildings, data centers, infrastructure and industries, by combining energy technologies, real-time automation, software, and services. It is a Fortune Global 500 company, and in FY2020, the company posted revenues of €25.2 billion. Head office is in Rueil-Malmaison, France, but has an international structure where its leadership and large numbers of its staff are spread across main offices also in Hong Kong, Noida, and Boston.

History 

In 1836, brothers Adolphe and Joseph-Eugene Schneider took over an abandoned foundry in Le Creusot, France. Two years later, they created Schneider & Cie, focusing primarily on the steel industry. Schneider & Cie rapidly grew, specializing in the production of heavy machinery and transportation equipment. In 1871, following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, it developed a main activity of manufacturing weapons with the encouragement of the government in Paris. It eventually became a complex group with industrial activities in many sites in France and abroad, including in Russia before 1917 and in Czechoslovakia between 1919 and 1938.

In the 1960s, Schneider was absorbed by Belgium’s Empain group, which in 1969 merged it with its own corporate structures to form Empain-Schneider. In 1980–1981, the Empain family sold its controlling stake to Paribas, which was in turn nationalized in 1982. In the 1980s and 1990s, the company, by then again named Schneider, divested from steel and shipbuilding and focused mainly on electricity through strategic acquisitions. These included Télémécanique in 1988, Square D in 1991, and Merlin Gerin in 1992.

Today

In 2021 Corporate Knights ranked Schneider Electric as the world’s most sustainable company.

It said “The world is decarbonizing. The key to doing so is electrifying essential aspects of our economies – power generation, heating and cooling, and transport – and ensuring that the electricity these sectors run on is zero-carbon and renewable.

It is fitting, then, that 2021’s most sustainable company on the Global 100 index is Schneider Electric. The French firm is at the heart of a megatrend that will define the global economy for decades to come, although it has never produced electricity itself.

Over the last 20 years, Schneider Electric has moved away from high-voltage electrical distribution to focus on data centres, decentralized electrical distribution (including off-grid solar storage) and smart solutions to make the world more electric, energy efficient, renewable and digital.

It has been a long journey, driven by two inspirational CEOs, Henri Lachmann and then Jean-Pascal Tricoire, who has run the company since 2006.

“It started with former UN secretary general Kofi Annan launching the Global Compact principles on sustainability,” says Gilles Vermot Desroches, senior vice-president for sustainable development and strategy. “We were one of the first companies to endorse them and to ask our suppliers to be more sustainable.”

“There are two sides to the sustainability coin,” he adds. “We aim to lead by example within our own operations and ecosystem, and we work to be part of the solution for our customers. Sustainability improves performance, innovation and our attractiveness as a place to work. It creates value.”

Besides curbing its own emissions by 250,000 metric tons of CO2 in 24 months by shifting to renewable energy, the company says its suite of energy-efficient technologies and services should save 120 million metric tons of CO2 on their customers’ behalf by the end of 2020.

Schneider Electric earned the top spot in the Corporate Knights ranking because of its strong performance across a range of sustainability criteria. The company earned 70% of its revenue from sustainable solutions, while 73% of its investments are directed toward sustainable solutions. It also performed strongly in areas including racial and gender diversity and resource productivity and safety.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dux6kG13QWM

The company is, despite roots that go back more than 180 years, in many ways a product of the digital age. “At the start of the internet, the big effort was to connect seven billion people. Today, 300 new assets connect to the internet every second. There are now more than 60 billion assets that can talk to people and to each other to make things run more efficiently,” Vermot Desroches points out. Simple but effective examples of this are controls that ensure that “if you’re not in the room, the light is not left on. If you’re not in the building, the heating is turned down.”

Although Schneider’s business focus is on the clean energy transition, its approach has a significant social aspect to it as well, which has been heightened by the pandemic. “We learned a lot about our impact as a company during COVID. This crisis would have been very different in 2010 without all the benefits that digital has brought, from ensuring hospitals have secure access to energy, to being able to manage business and personal relationships online.”

At the heart of the company’s efforts has been a shift from shareholder value to emphasizing stakeholder value, says Vermot Desroches. “If we want to continue to lead, we have to work with our stakeholders, including our suppliers. We’re asking all our tier-one suppliers to cut their emissions by 50%. We’re asking them to respect human rights.”

A key move, in 2017, was to “build a bridge between our KPIs and the [UN] Sustainable Development Goals,” he adds. These key performance indicators include growing green revenues to 80%, giving 50 million people access to green energy and training one million underprivileged people in energy management.

“The average age in Africa is 19, and 70% of the population [is] under 30. One in six under-30s who had a job in January lost them this year. It is impossible to solve problems for only part of the population. And we need these young people to provide innovation. We must involve them to harness the power of a generation of digital natives.”

“We’re a very technical company, but when it comes down to it, we empower people,” Vermot Desroches concludes. “We believe that access to energy and digital is a basic human right.”

“Hero-entrepreneur dreams up a great idea, finds a sidekick or two to help it come alive, clashes with and defeats the entrenched incumbent, and rides to glory as the credits roll” …

The story of Sonos might seem like that, from a distance. Its four founders – John MacFarlane, Tom Cullen, Trung Mai, and Craig Shelburne – conjured a daring vision based on technology that didn’t exist at the time. Fuelled with the insight earned from success in the first phase of Internet-based business-building, they chose as their next mission a new way to bring music to every home – wirelessly, in multiple rooms, from PCs and the Internet, with awesome sound. They hired an amazing team who built amazing products from scratch, and music devotees all over the world found a new brand to fall in love with.

What are the frustrations and failures they experienced on the journey? Are there larger lessons to be learned? The story of what Sonos did and is doing might be familiar to many. With first-ever details, what follows is the story of how.

John MacFarlane moved to Santa Barbara in 1990 to get his PhD from University of California-Santa Barbara. Instead, he saw the promise of the Internet and built Software.com along with Craig, Tom and Trung. After Software.com merged with Phone.com in 2000 to create Openwave, they moved on to figure out together what to do next.

Whatever was going to be next, they knew they wanted to stay together, and stay in Santa Barbara, due to the roots they and their families had begun to establish there. It was, perhaps, the beginning of a habit of unorthodox choices to add both a degree of difficulty and a fresh perspective to the work.

As Tom describes it, the view from Santa Barbara contained four big insights drawn, in his words, from being “at the core of the Internet as it was blowing up”: