Build and grow a company ready for the next generation of consumers
In Seeding Innovation: The Path to Profit and Purpose in the 21st Century, veteran entrepreneur, award winning author, global strategist, speaker, and Rice University Innovation and Entrepreneurship professor, Robyn O’Brien, delivers an insightful and data driven roadmap to authenticity and smart leadership in the face of accelerating technological, environmental, and social change. In the book, you’ll discover how to build resilience, authenticity, market share and purpose into your business plan and move beyond box-ticking, virtue signaling and one-dimensional metrics, in a way that strengthens your business model, enhances your bottom line, attracts investors, fortifies employee retention, and more.
With her characteristic candor and attention to data and deep experience on the frontlines of industry change, Robyn explains how you can transform concepts like paradigm blindness, scarcity, imposter syndrome, rejection, and fear to build durable, lasting, and profitable businesses that integrate social and environmental principles, with courage and integrity to drive long term shareholder and stakeholder value.
You’ll also discover how to:
- Develop a purpose-driven product line that holds strong appeal for new generations of consumers and avoids the ruthless practices associated with PR nightmares and externalized costs
- Build an iconic company that focuses on integrating meaningful change to inspire customers, investors, and employees and that eschews meaningless press releases and virtue signaling
- Overcome imposter syndrome and naysayers using the S.T.O.P. Protocol ™
- Develop supportive scaffolding and a resilient mindset in order to leverage courage and gain market share
- Build boards (not echo chambers), why equity and governance matters, and how diversity is good for your bottom line
- Integrate authentic marketing and storytelling into your brand strategy to drive revenue and capture market share
- Avoid the dangers of silos, fundraising traps and toxic capital and build a model with value-aligned, informed investors.
- Spot greenwashing, gender washing, and carbon washing, and more importantly, how to avoid them within your own organization and drive change
- Address headlines around ESG and DEI metrics in order to meet the needs of asset managers and investors, build successful teams and integrate goals that are central to outperformance and higher returns
Gen Z and the modern consumer are looking for companies with authenticity - they want transparency and purpose from brands that are future proofing for the planet they’re inheriting. With this changing consumer focus and mindset emerges an urgent need for emotionally intelligent leadership. Along with profitability, 21st century leaders must focus on environmental stewardship, equity and justice, employee retention, recruiting, collaboration, and emerging other key aspects of modern business.
Table of Contents
Author’s Note ix
Chapter 1 Blind Spots and Big Opportunities 1
Chapter 2 Finding Fearless Friends 31
Chapter 3 The Eye- popping Return on Authenticity 53
Chapter 4 Venture Capital’s Biases 75
Chapter 5 The Liability of Ignorance 99
Chapter 6 Imposter Syndrome and “Not Enough- ness” 115
Chapter 7 Nature Is the Bottom Line 129
Chapter 8 How to Handle the Curveballs 149
Chapter 9 Risk Mitigation and Transparency 175
Chapter 10 Fourteen Steps to Your Personal Sustainability Plan 203
Appendix A: Your Personal Balance Sheet 227
Appendix B: A 101 on Funding for Startups 229
Acknowledgments 231
About the Author 233
Index 235
