Episode 2/24 Wisdom Workshop: Frugal innovation with Gitta Peyn (German)Considering growth as its own problem, i.e. overproduction, can be frightening. This can quickly lead to one-dimensional thinking, so that people, especially in industrialized nations, quickly...

I talk with Dr. Jan Berstermann about sustainable innovations and the influence of stages of consciousness. Of course, we put these into our contexts and define them. For us, it is important to clarify that consciousness stages serve as an orientation, just as a navigation system guides us through maps, and it should in no way be seen as an ideologizing categorization.

Dr. Berstermann is an industrial engineer and holds a doctorate in economics, particularly in the field of sustainable management. Together with Prof. Dr. Karin Schnitker, he heads the Reallabor Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Agile Leadership at Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences and has been a lecturer in the areas of corporate sustainability management and systemic leadership, among others, since 2017. Between 2015 and 2017, he worked as an organizational consultant in a medium-sized group of companies in the organic food industry.

Also this time I talk about the topic of Frugal Innovation, as I talk with Flo Oberhofer, a German sustainability consultant living in India.

In this podcast we talk about “simple” technologies, why over-engineering is not helpful in countries like India, the impact Flo is having with his team at Terra Preta in India and how this is helping farmers, who are getting natural and affordable fertilizers as a result.

Terra Preta Impact Innovations LLP was established to help EU-based companies and organizations develop impact projects and create sustainability businesses in India.

With a strong focus on conscious and social entrepreneurship, Flo and his team work in various SDG-related areas such as biodiversity, clean tech, circular economy, responsible sourcing or regenerative agriculture. By creating independent businesses, they help companies redefine their value chains towards a future-proof, sustainable approach.

Pixabay-Image by Annca

The world is changing at an unprecedented rate. We have actually long since understood that higher, faster and further is not the solution for the future viability of humanity. “Because we can no longer afford as a global society to continue our consumption of resources as we have been doing, we must … think about our product architecture. That’s the contribution of frugal innovation in terms of sustainability, putting resource consumption to the test in terms of efficiency and in terms of effectiveness.” Prof. Dr. Rajnish Tiwari
The conversation with Prof. Dr. Rajnish Tiwari gives a deep insight into the topic of “frugal innovation” in the sense of “appropriate”. What can the Western world learn from developments in emerging markets and what impact do these have on product composition, on the way the Western world also has to go in order to avoid wasting resources? We discuss this and much more in this podcast.

Enjoy listening.

With Wellicious, Heike has developed a brand for yoga clothing that focuses on honest and traceable sustainability. We talk about her path to becoming self-employed, which inner and outer processes the mother of three has gone through and which hurdles there are in building a sustainable brand. In this interview, we look at different aspects that are necessary to be able to grasp the complexity behind it. Thank you Heike, for this valuable interview, from which companies, suppliers and consumers can learn.

Pixabay Image by Gert Altmann