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."
Tweet This
3 
