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Flooring Company Takes Innovation Cues From Mother Nature
Biomimicry R&D practices and the Goldfire innovation platform are steering Interface on a path to sustainability
Beth Stackpole -- Design News, July 30, 2008
Call it nature's way of coming full circle. More than a decade after Interface Inc. Chairman Ray Anderson embraced his vision to lead the company on a path to sustainability, the carpet manufacturer's R&D group is well along in a transformation to take its innovation and new product design cues from that most highly regarded source-- Mother Nature.
Anderson, who credits customers for getting him to think seriously about environmental impact well before it was the blockbuster business imperative, assembled myriad teams as far back as 1996 to develop a framework for what a sustainable, non-oil dependent company might look like. The teams examined everything from how the company sourced its materials to its energy consumption and its product development processes to retool with a sustainable edge. The goal: To convert Interface to a completely sustainable business model by 2020.
Today, Interface is well ahead of the sustainability pack, having traveled about 40% of its way through its transformational journey. Led by the vision of Anderson, Interface is among a growing number of industry pioneers that believe wholesale changes to all facets of a company are imperative not just for success, but for survival. "We've built an industrial system that lived off Mother Nature's savings, not its cash flow and that can't go on forever," explains John Bradford, Interface's vice president of operations and R&D." We're starting to see some of the social and economic issues that will happen whenever oil becomes truly scarce. The face of business will absolutely change if we can't break our oil addiction."
The exploration of sustainability led the Interface R&D group to the practice of biomimicry, which looks to nature as the muse for innovations around engineering and manufacturing. One of the first principles adopted in the product development area was to mirror how nature reacts to negative energy, first by evaluating inputs and then adapting. Following suit, the Interface R&D group went out to the marketplace and sought negative input. "Five years before, we might have asked customers what they wanted and the answer would be, `what we have, but cheaper,'" Bradford explains. "We started asking different questions like what they hated about what they already had. It was then we started hearing about things that were opportunistic for new and greater business."
Radical R&D
That research was the springboard for some radical new thinking around design. Following the principle that everything is different in nature, Interface began to experiment with designing patterns and color schemes that were varied, instead of honing its development and manufacturing operations to produce consistent fabrics or colors. "Not a single blade of grass is the same color nor is a single leaf the same size," Bradford explains, "meanwhile we try to design everything in perfect harmony." As a result of that effort, Interface began to have two dye lots in the same tile and to make every tile design different on purpose. The resulting product line, called Entropy, fast became a top selling carpet style, and the innovation doubled the size of Interface's business between 2002 and 2007, he says.
Next, the R&D group began to apply biomimicry practices to traditional product development. In one example, the group determined that buyers selected carpet tile over products like broadloom when they required flexibility, say for moving offices. "Yet we were gluing carpet tile to floors," Bradford says. An R&D team hit the drawing board and conducted months of studies on glue and nature, evaluating organisms like mussels, flies and the suction cups on octopus. Finally the teams determined that nature didn't use glue, but rather applied gravity. The resulting Interface product innovation was TacTiles, a way to leverage the dimensional design of the tile backing to employ gravity to make it hold. "We had to totally change the way we thought about installation," Bradford says. "We brought the products to market two and a half years ago, and we're now selling 2 million a month."
Flush with its success, Interface pushed the concept even further. Feeding off nature's idea of feedback loops and realizing that the TacTile design supplied a node every 50 centimeters, the R&D team began an exercise of questioning what the floor knew that could be useful to building inhabitants. Using new advancements in RFID (radio frequency identification) technology, Interface is now pilot testing a product, due out in 2009, that essentially creates a GPS (global positioning system) of everything in a building. Applications are numerous, including those around security, tracking retail traffic and helping hospitals keep track of lifesaving equipment and patients.
While such innovations indicate Interface is cruising on the sustainable innovation track, there have been bumps along the way. Changing the culture of the R&D and engineering organization was a major challenge as was encouraging engineers and designers to problem solve in different ways, Bradford says. Having strong leadership drive the vision was crucial to getting engineering buy in. Interface's R&D group also prioritized creating a culture that would encourage people to share. "You need to have a culture that is trustful and that doesn't have a problem with making mistakes," he explains. "Celebrating missteps along the way and having faith in the process is probably one of the most important steps."
Another big hurdle to conquer was encouraging the R&D group to branch out into areas where it didn't necessarily have expertise. "A major challenge to this is that Mother Nature takes you places you've never really been," he says. "RFID is a perfect example. You don't think of RFID and carpet together."
One of the tools that helped Interface make such connections was the Goldfire innovation platform from Invention Machine. Goldfire's deep search capabilities, domain expertise and access to all kinds of third-party resources, including patent literature and engineering communities, enabled the R&D group to incorporate external domain knowledge into its innovation processes, not to mention, build on prior concepts and ideas.
"We as engineers and designers tend to be specialized-we know our subject matter well, but oftentimes when you're talking about biomimicry or innovative problem solving, those are solutions that lie outside the domain of our direct experience," says Jim Todhunter, Invention Machine CTO. "Goldfire can help people look at biomimicry issues that are outside of their area of expertise. It provides access to outside domain knowledge and internal information so they don't have to reinvent the wheel."
Along with encouraging engineers to challenge their way of thinking, Goldfire also has capabilities and methodologies to help Interface analyze possible failure modes, which aids in its ability to winnow down the number of possible design choices. Being to able to kill projects more quickly means the company doesn't waste money on pursuing bad ideas. The software and product development changes have also sped up the innovation process to be three times faster than it was previously and it's made ideas that do get commercialized far more marketable.
"What we've done is taken our eye off our competitors and put our eye on our customers and started to innovate for them," Bradford says. "As a result, we're developing products that are more appealing and we're more successful in R&D."
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Flooring Company Takes Innovation Cues From Mother Nature
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