I’m the co-founder of The Green Sprint. We help other businesses to develop and validate green and sustainable solutions by facilitating and guiding them through a 5-day innovation process. Social and sustainable innovation is very closely interwoven because of the impact of climate change eventually and already now will have on social structures and societies on a global level. We aim to help the companies to decrease the negative impact on the environment and thereby will increase their positive effect on societies and social structures. We work with organizations that actively want to tackle a particular sustainability challenge. We are mainly there to help them navigate the process of innovation and can call an expert when necessary. The challenge itself can be pretty much anything, and the company itself can also be pretty much in any sector. To give you an idea we could work with a restaurant that wants to minimize food waste or other types of waste or a toy manufacturer wants to explore circular and collaborative circular toys. And for example, we can explore collaborative business models of an online retailer that wants to decrease the environmental impact of their processes for returning goods. For me, the point that I started to believe in making a true impact through entrepreneurship is only recently. I’ve been working on it for a couple of years and that came to existence when I found the right people to keep me employed and the right people to work with. We innovate to create a better world for all of us, and I think this is best achieved when we put our minds together. I’m also a team player. Working with others gives you so much energy and so much inspiration. It challenges you to question your assumptions constantly, and they keep you on point, and most of all, they make it more comfortable to go into the entrepreneurial journey because you can fall back onto each other. I think it is very important to join a Social Innovation Academy LinkedIn group and similar types of groups as well because we cannot solve the problem we have in this world. We cannot solve the social challenges or sustainable challenges if we all stay in our sector with our ideas. We have to work cross-sectoral and learn from each other. The best ideas often come from taking one idea from one sector and implementing it in the other one, and that is what the Social Innovation Academy does well. It shows you as well as other options. So it’s a really good place to learn and start from. I recommend joining.

Interviewed by Maja Novak