Mihela Hladin - Founder of Greennovate and MaGiC (Made GREEN in China)
Saturday, 26 December 2009 | Spin-Offs and Start-Ups
The WSJE Future Leadership Institute invited Slovenian Mihela Hladin (35) to portray her start-up "Greennovate' in China.
Our Western ethos of limitless, cheap consumption has etched its mark into the "world's factory", and its casualties are stark and unmistakable; city-sized piles of decaying discarded computer parts, villages merged with tortured, industrial landscapes, and a pall of polluted haze that blankets the whole country.
About Mihela Hladin
Being born and raised in Slovenia, one of the world's smallest countries, gives one a bit of stubbornness. Maybe this is why Mihela has always been intrigued by challenges that "cannot" be overcome. An unusual combination of business sense and idealism, Mihela turned her eye to environmental issues in China in 2006. Drawing on experience from Slovenia's environmental recovery, she soon saw the potential for bottom-up change. At the end of 2007 she founded Greennovate, a social business that is constantly pushing traditional barriers, integrating sustainable concepts into business and community practices in China. In a country full of talent, she is inspired by the way that people in China embrace new ideas. The next "cannot" in Greennovate's way is shifting the focus from "Made in China" to "Made GREEN in China" through the recently established MaGiC platform.
Mihela Hladin, founder of Greennovate China
Harvesting Passion: The key to China's New Green Movement: Greennovate in China
We hear it almost everywhere in business, politics, even sports: "China is the new frontier," perhaps the last real one. If you can make it here, to paraphrase Sinatra, you don't even need to make it anywhere else.
With China's explosive growth now so consistent that it ceases to surprise, there are a lot of things we don't hear about in the West, particularly in terms of China's nascent green movement and the hundreds of millions of rural Chinese living in second and third-tier cities.
By some estimates, there are half a billion Chinese living below what Western countries consider the poverty line, and it is this massive group that is ignored by foreign companies hoping to make in-roads in the Middle Kingdom.
So, while it would be worthwhile to see China's urban elite driving hybrids and eating organic foods, the core of the changes that need to take place will happen far from international hubs like Shanghai and Beijing. It will arise in China's mid-level cities, those home to fewer than five million people, which, by their sheer quantity, are the largest factors in China's environmental impact. It is here that the movement for a more sustainable future for China and the rest of the world is most critical, and so it is here that Greennovate began our work.
The Greennovate story grew out of my personal experiences. I arrived in China in early 2006, when the environmental services firm I had been working for transferred me from my native Slovenia. Never had I imagined that my career would take me to China, and the transition from a country of 2 million people to a place where everything is measured in billions was staggering.
When the immediate shock of the numbers and cultural differences began to subside, I began the thankless task of attempting to persuade industrial owners that installing pollution control equipment was in their best interests. They were understandably wary of anything that might cut into their already-thin profit margins, but the pattern of short-view thinking that began to emerge was disheartening.
Most of these industrial firms pressed themselves firmly to the task of rapid growth, trying to stake out a claim on an exploding market. In this gold-rush context, all other concerns took a back seat, and environmental impacts were ignored when possible and hastily addressed only as a final alternative. During this time I witnessed first-hand the many environmental consequences of economic growth and prosperity.
Our Western ethos of limitless, cheap consumption has etched its mark into the "world's factory", and its casualties are stark and unmistakable--city-sized piles of decaying discarded computer parts, villages merged with tortured, industrial landscapes, and a pall of polluted haze that blankets the whole country.
One day, while visiting a lead smelter that had brought both an economic boost and corresponding toll to the environment and human health of the city where it was located, I asked a question that would become a milestone for me and my future decisions. I asked the owner of the plant if his children would come back after studying to live in the contaminated city. He told me, "You foreigners make difficult things so simple and we Chinese make difficult things so complicated."
I was stunned. Despite his business acumen, he had never thought to look beyond the achievement of immediate financial stability. It was then that I decided that if I were to stay in China, I would focus on overall sustainability concepts for companies to understand how they could benefit from implementing more sustainable practices, and at the same time to help the younger generation understand how to bring sustainable change into current business operations after they finish school.
By starting from the bottom up in building environmental awareness, I saw an opportunity to empower students and help them to develop a sense of responsibility in taking care of the world around them. Given the astonishing passion in the way these young people responded, it stood to reason that a powerful force for a system change toward sustainability didn't necessarily have to be that far off.
Greennovate was launched as a social enterprise - a hybrid of for-profit business and non-profit organization. As a business, we consult for SMEs and multinational companies in China, providing customized training on environment, green product concept development and sustainability strategy development and implementation. The non-profit arm is aimed at empowering China's younger generation with tools and knowledge for sustainable development, based on our experience with business.
In the beginning, some argued that we should develop in the same way as NGOs in the West, but I was reluctant to do so. I trusted my intuition that we needed to run as a good business to gain respect in the community and at the same time, use our experience from working with business, to create relevant China-based content and local case studies to inspire youth.
One of Greennovate's first endeavors on the community side was the GECKO (Greennovate Environmental Challenge for Kids Outreach) program, which visits high-schools in China and gives students the tools and education they need to understand the importance of sustainability and, most importantly, how to act in bringing it about.
GECKO's empowerment effort began as a once-a-month volunteer program organized by the Greennovate staff, but soon developed into a bigger initiative.
While at first we supported the program ourselves, doing all the materials development and teaching and covering all the related costs, eventually various businesses saw the benefits of GECKO and expressed an interest in partnering with us.
My simple idea, to truly start from the bottom up in building the idea of environmental responsibility, took flight and developed into a larger-scale program, reaching thousands of young Chinese and helping them put their vast passion reserves to good use.
After a year of running the GECKO program, we realized that, in addition to high-school students, university students throughout China were also in need of environmental education and empowerment.
More significantly though, we saw the chance to introduce the idea of sustainability as a good business opportunity to many of the future leaders of Chinese business and society. Greennovate initiated MaGiC (Made GREEN in China), which trains and educates university students all over China about what they can do to help their planet and to plan their future careers with sustainability in mind.
One unique thing about GECKO and MaGiC is that instead of using imported, translated content and materials, we developed China-specific content, adapting a somewhat Western methodology to use in imparting it.
We wanted to go beyond simply educating Chinese about the small things that they can do to help the environment. Of course, our training and education sessions discuss the importance of "every-day environmentalism", simple steps like saving energy, recycling and using manual or public transportation.
But given how passionate young Chinese are about helping the movement toward sustainability, there is an important opportunity to engage people in a more personal, experiential way.
It can, at times, be difficult for some Westerners to understand some of the underlying differences between their societies and the predominant forces of the Chinese social order.
In China, command-and-control government policies, familial obligations, and the sheer weight of the population and the intense competition that results present limitations in the individual's ability to pursue his or her own personal happiness.
This dynamic, however, has created some interesting consequences: with fewer outlets to channel their private energy and passion into, many Chinese are, in essence, seeking something to be passionate about.
A nation of only-children has, gradually, led to a very strong desire for a sense of community and connection that tends not to exist within the typically small nuclear family unit. In other words, because many Chinese grow up without siblings, they have the chance to choose many of their own "brothers and sisters", and develop very close relationships outside of their families, often to a greater extent than in many Western societies.
These tight relationships are important, because they allow ideas and beliefs to spread quickly and effectively through social networks. This phenomenon of sharing real, actionable interest within a community, is hugely significant for the sustainability movement in Chinese society and culture, because it fuels an exponentiation of green thinking and, most importantly, education, among Chinese, particularly younger Chinese. It's time to rethink the Western stereotype, bred in part during their parents' and grandparents' generation, of the "fall-in-line", blindly productive Chinese worker.
This type of enthusiasm is at the core of what Greennovate is aiming for in China and why multiplications of the projects can be fast if done in careful, nonthreatening ways. We are developing a unique model of social enterprise, targeting both businesses and communities. Their synergy is serving the same goal of increasing environmental awareness and individual responsibility. Both of our elements also share most of the clients: many of the consulting arm's business partners have also developed and executed their own education and outreach programs in their regions.
There's certainly a long way to go, and even large changes can go unnoticed in a nation of nearly one and a half billion. That big scary number, however, can also be an advantage, because anything that has a powerful effect in China can go on to change the rest of the planet.
In tapping into the staggering talent and passion of the Chinese people and helping its businesses embrace sustainability, it might be the biggest challenge for us at Greennovate and for me personally, but it is for sure not the last one;)
Mihela Hladin
More information about Greennovate can be found at www.greennovate.net
Mihela Hladin Director
Greennovate (Shanghai) Co.
Ltd. Room 203, Building 1 528 Kangding Road 200040 Shanghai
China
http://www.greennovate.net/
Tel: +86 21 3229 0343
Fax:+86 21 6288 1955
Cell:+86 1381 613 0756
E mail: mihela.hladin@gmail.com
Twitter: @greennovate
