At Pineapple, we're all about forming commercial partnerships to accelerate the transition. But who are those partnerships actually between? There are at least three levels at which we need to answer that question: i) systemic, ii) organisational and iii) personal.
At the system level, we are building partnerships that bring together the fundamental enablers of change - technology that delivers impact, financing to enable scale and profitability and delivery capacity to bring it to life. We do all of this in the context of an enabling regulatory environment, with the right permissions, incentives and encouragement to deliver the change we need.
This approach to system change fundamentally relies on organisations signing up to be part of it. That means building a shared understanding of the problem and connecting on a vision for a better future. It means acting in faith that your own corporate interests will be protected when brought together with others. We tend to find that it is senior leaders of organisations who are able to take the bold step to envisage a different future and can see the role of partnership as an enabler of the change. Organisations need a push from above to place their bets on partnership working.
But in reality, it isn't organisations that are the actual partners in the work that we do. It's individual people. The real bet is made less by the organisation and more by the people who commit their time, their conviction and their positive spirit in pursuit of collaboration for the greater good. At Pineapple, we are so grateful to the many special individuals amongst our partners, without whom, we would be entirely unable to make anything happen at all!
This year, we are going to be focusing less on 'what' commercial partnerships for sustainability are about and more on the 'how' we bring them to life. For that, we need to think across each of these three levels - how to bring parts of the system together for impact at scale, how we help organisations buy-in to something new and how we work with individuals to build trust, transparency and openness that drives collective success for each other, our organisations and our world at large.
