Image from The LA Times Altered Oceans series

Last weekend I was invited to judge the Innovation Challenge Final Round, a competition held at the University of Virginia’s Darden Business School to identify the “Most Innovative MBA Team” in the world, alongside other judges from the upper echelons of companies like American Express, Hilton, Harley Davidson, Philips Whirlpool and Shell to name a few. Sixty three teams from fifty seven countries took part. I thought judging it would be pretty easy – I’ve been on the other side of the table in VC and pitch situations many times before, but after the first day I found myself shell shocked.

The scope and complexity of the problems the teams had to solve, and we had to judge, were staggering. After spending the last two years thinking and writing about individuals innovating in some way that then affects everyone else in the world from the bottom up, it was challenging for me to look at it from the point of view of a middle manager, in a large multinational, trying to implement a new strategy across a company that straddles different countries, cultures and time zones. It was an incredible weekend, and I would recommend the challenge to any company looking for some new perspectives on what it is they do.

On Day Two of the challenge, the teams were presented with a problem related to sustainability and environmental concerns, and how corporations should be talking to consumers about what it is they are doing. This got me thinking a lot about sustainability in relation to my work, and I hit upon something that’s been bothering me ever since: If you can download something electronically, it doesn’t seem responsible to consume a physical version, given the environmental impact created by many of our disposable physical goods. And if corporations are not giving us the option to download electronic versions of their products, even if it’s possible to do so, is there an ethical case for downloading them anyway to force them to change?

It’s a weak argument in most cases. And if there are legitimate alternatives to physical products such as paid-for mp3 files or e-books (which are about to change everything, or not, but that’s for another time), it isn’t an argument at all. But in some cases it seems to make sense. Forcing mandatory consumption of clunky plastic boxes and bags, which will most likely end up in the giant plastic island in the Pacific, or cost us money as tax payers to recycle, seems a bit like an indirect tax. Someone has to pay for that, and it’s not the producer of the plastic box, they’re getting something for nothing and forcing someone else to bear the cost involuntarily, or to put it another way, stealing. So is piracy an appropriate response?

Piracy enables people to consume things without taking any of the costs into account. We should have the right to buy goods in physical form, of course, but all the costs need to be taken into account too, or isn’t it also piracy at some level?