 Hi everybody. My name is Georgie Benardete. I am the CEO of the Impact Investing Marketplace Alliance 17. And it's such a pleasure to have today Susan Graham and Simon Mokehi who are joining us to discuss everything about innovation systems changing and what does it take to scale the STGs. So we have a very short and but exciting 30 minutes. So we'll get started with both Simon and Susan spending time first to you know introduce yourselves from your perspective and also share your perspective and the way you define the word innovation. And thank you so much for being here with us today. Shall I kick it off? Sure. Fantastic. Well thanks obviously for having us here and Simon I look forward to having a good discussion. As some background the CEO of Dendro Systems and we really started because of a challenge. A challenge that was unacceptable for us to just walk past. And that for us is increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere year on year and a loss of biodiversity 10 times higher than it's been in the last 10 million years. And you know there are very few challenges in this world which have their own deadline, their own clock. We often have to artificially create that deadline. We call it a war on something, a war on cancer to create that deadline. And here we've been given one for the whole of the world to take up as an innovation challenge. And that's the environment talking to us and setting that deadline. So that's what we've taken on at Dendro Systems and spend all our energy coming up with solutions for it. And then Simon Mulcahy, Chief Innovation Officer at Salesforce. And for those of you who don't know Salesforce, it's a 21-year-old company now, barely just out of being a teenager. And the fastest growing enterprise software company. And really our job is to bring customers in there and the companies and their customers together. So imagine creating a single source of truth around your customers and enabling you to engage them. And for us innovation is actually a value that we have. It's one of the core values of Salesforce. So there's innovation happening at every level. And we like to think of it much more in the context of kind of applied innovation. How you use technology in the context of creating real meaningful outcomes. And we'll talk more about that I'm sure. Thank you so much Simon. So you know as I was preparing for the session, I found I'm here in Seattle right now. There is around 1,175 books with the word innovate. So it'd be tempting to think like Harvard Business School things that we should not use that word. And however, Susan from your perspective, you definitely understand the power of innovation, not just as an innovation in technology for the sake of it, for innovation of the service of the world. And also one thing to remind ourselves, you and your company were chosen one of the top three, you know, ideas and realities in support of up links, one trillion tree challenge. So I think what's interesting for me is to understand what was a thought process by which you were able to finally, you know, to finally, you know, figure out a way to get restoration of ecosystems done right in a way that we could get to that deadline that you so well described. Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like I'm almost a mix between two people. I'm someone who's incredibly impatient. And a lot of the people who are in our team have that lack of patience, that sense of urgency in everything that we do. And one of my favorite quotes from Tom Chi is doing is the best kind of thinking. And so we've got that kind of an attitude. And then that has actually collided with what I picked up from Oxford when I did my PhD there, which is when you come up with an idea and you've got that urgency, we were very much encouraged to, you know, go sit under a tree for a while and just think about that, which is obviously in complete contrast to getting something done and executing. But it's so important to reflect on the why and reflect on the problem because, as you said, there's been lots of innovation on earth. And sometimes we've innovated in the right direction. We've spent, you know, years and millions of people's lives and dedication towards innovating something. And then perhaps we've reflected and said, did we go in the right direction? We've gone in that direction. But did we go in the right direction? And so when I think about specifically around carbon, and obviously the problem we're tackling around restoring biodiverse natural ecosystems is much more than carbon. But when we look at carbon, we have a carbon cycle. And at the moment, we're not in a carbon cycle, we're on a carbon path. It's as if we've set ourselves in motion on this path that's not sustainable. And we need to get back down to a state to be back in a carbon cycle. And so it is about asking this question, what problem are we solving? And are we creating another problem for the future? And that's why we take a holistic approach to say we're not just solving for carbon dioxide. Because if we were, we might plant monocultures over the whole earth. How terrible would that be if we just destroy the world's ecosystems and the potential for biodiversity on earth because of solving one just in its own little discrete corner. So we very much take a holistic approach to say, there's a better way of doing this. We can actually solve multiple challenges all at once if we can just find the solutions and work with the right partners to solve the bigger problem. So that when we reflect and sit under a tree, we can be happy about what we've seen, but we can go fast and solve those problems. Thank you so much. Now, I'm a neuroscience geek and neuroscience support your idea of pausing before you start. So and that's where the best ideas seem to come out. Simon, I love what she's mentioning of kind of thinking about innovation in the right direction. Right. And once again about not just sake of it, but what are the elements that ensure that innovation is indeed going into the right direction. I understand from our conversations in Salesforce that you have thought about this and that you have a very specific process by which the full company, all of the employees, the value system and the understanding of why you're doing innovation makes sure that the results are positive, viable and bring success to your clients. Could you discuss a little bit about that process? Yeah. So we have a process which is effectively how we ensure that everybody in the company is aligned. It's what we call our V2 mom and I'll break that down in a minute. I think it's maybe worthwhile just pausing though first and talking a little bit of kind of to follow on from what Susan was saying. In order to have, in order to innovate, you kind of need to be really, really clear on what you're trying to achieve. And I think all too often people innovate thinking that all they're doing is improving the system that they had before them. It's an incremental style of innovation. That's fine, but all you're going to ever do then is you're leaning on the behaviour of the past, the thinking of the past. And if you look at the world that we live in today, much of the world that we live in, we've accepted, but the people who shaped it are dead, have been dead for a long, long time. And we just continue to absorb their thinking as if it's immutable and we shouldn't change it. So actually a lot of innovation has to be now not about translating what they did into a modern sense, but actually pausing and thinking about how you might, with a beginner's mind, look at the problem. And that for us is step one. It's a beginner's mind. And if you don't have that beginner's mind, all you're going to do is basically just pick up where everybody left off and haul it, like whatever, you're going to turn the wing nut, a couple of cranks to the right, a couple of squirts of oil is the best you can do with any system. That's not good enough in a world where change is accelerating. So even a system that I'll explain to you is irrelevant if you're just incrementally approaching it. And that does mean the beginner's mind is fundamentally important. How are you really, really looking at the world and going bearing in mind everything I know and everything I have at my fingertips, what can I do to make this system better? So I think that's kind of the first thing. And that beginner's mind is something that you'll hear Mark Benioff at Salesforce talk about all the time. And it's what's allowed us not to just keep innovating in an incremental improvement way, but to actually pause and reassess and then look at everything that we have and then move forward. And when you do it like that, you still need to then get everybody that you've got around you and go, okay, we've got a new plan. Beginner's mind has delivered this amazing insight. We're going to go now go over there. How do you get everyone to follow you over there? And everybody else like, oh, hold on a minute, I'm on the other story. I'm going in that direction is a really, really important question. And so we have this process where you have a vision, which aligns everyone, what are we going to achieve? Everybody has a vision. And that starts with a CEO, the vision for the whole company. What are the values then what matters to you? So Salesforce are values are trust, customer success, innovation equality. So that then orient people that as we're going in that direction, we must always align to those four kind of cultural values. Methods, how are we going to achieve that? Obstacles, what will prevent us from achieving that? Metrics, how will we know when we've achieved it? And we still, it's kind of a cascade. Everybody in the company starting with a CEO, we have a vision for the corporation, we sit down with our top leaders and go through this, is does this V2 mom work? We beat it up in management meetings. And then it's good enough. We go, right, that's it. There's no other plan. It's just this V2 mom. And then everybody writes theirs on the back of that and the cascade model. What that does is it does ensure that everybody goes in that direction that everybody has the same values that the budget, what we, how we spend on our money and resources is aligns to that. And if stuff's not on the V2 mom, it doesn't happen. So change the V2 mom or shut up and get on with doing your job in the V2 mom. And that's nice and crisp and clear. And that allows for momentum and efficiency of effort. That's amazing. I can, I can sense how exciting it must be to have everybody going towards that vision and how and achieving that vision makes it more probable. Susan, you mentioned about partners. And so Alliance 17, number 17 is a not to partnership for the goals. So the notion that the only way we're going to achieve the promise of the goals is by working together. Usually in some audiences, when I'm, when I'm more daring, I use the word radical collaboration and just radical thinking, radical collaboration. And I think to Simon's point is new thinking, not trying to replicate what people who are dead now taught us. So how do you see that happening in your space, Susan, that is you're bringing so many actors to the table? What is the thought process that makes that just like Simon has internally in Salesforce, you have across the network of partners and clients and vendors to make things happen? Yeah. And I think that the question around partnership often makes you ask that second question around time scale. So sometimes I was giving a talk about five years ago, and we were reflecting on apps and would be, would the iPhone exist in five or 10 years? You know, it was a question and it was uncertain, you know, am I creating an app, right, with this functionality that might be on a platform that fundamentally doesn't exist in a short, in a relatively short time period. And so when we think of partners, you know, I often acknowledge the traditional custodians of our land. And that that is to acknowledge all that has come before us, and the people and the communities who have built what we what we have today, and then to acknowledge the future, and that the future is long. I'm an optimist, I believe that the future is very long, and beyond our imagination for time scale. And so then when we bring it back down to today, and the urgency of the challenges that we have, it becomes quite clear that you need to partner to solve this challenge, because we are not looking to create change in a blip. Some challenges, we hope fingers crossed are a blip. COVID is a natural disaster. And it will relatively in on reflection be shown as a short one. Where we're looking at our climate and and our biodiverse ecosystems, this is a trend. This is a long term challenge at the moment, and long term responsibility going into the future to live in a sustainable way and innovate and have the technology to support restoration of these ecosystems. So when we think about partnership, it's very much an acknowledgement of the timeline, and then in terms of capacity. And so at Dendra Systems, we provide technological services to enable our mission is to enable scalable restoration of the natural world. It's not to do scalable restoration of the natural world. Of course, we do we have a an aerial seeding service, which is a drone that goes and plants trees and shrubs and crosses. And so of course, we're doing it. We have we have a AI system that goes and analyzes every blade of grass and every animal, every whisker on a kangaroo. But but really what we're doing is enabling others. And so that, you know, is core to to who we are because when when we think about this, it's at this, there's a hyper local scale, where you've got local communities and stakeholders, you've got regulatory bodies, you've got finance groups that are all looking to to execute and we support that as almost an operational intelligence layer. But then when you look at that even broader scale, you're enabling complete system change. And this is where we've been described as an innovation catalyst. So we have we have an innovation, but we're catalyzing innovation around us. And that is in terms of markets, that's the way that people think about how to invest in ecosystem restoration, how we think about a sustainable world, not just from an environmental perspective, but from a financial perspective. And so so this is where you've got this hyper local partnership, very direct. And then you've almost because being an innovation catalyst, there's these knock on effects. And so you require other people or rather other people do change their behavior. And so we need to consider how are we changing their behavior and their systems by by what we do. So so partnership is is very important to us. And we, you know, you know, contracts might last for five years, but the partnership is really for 20 or 50 years in an acknowledgement that that's how long it takes to restore an ecosystem. And, and so that's the way I think about partnership. And obviously, it's critically important because otherwise, a, we might get it all wrong and b, it won't last very long. Mm hmm. That's fascinating, right? The power of words, like how how the solution changes when you see yourself from, you know, do or versus enabler and also kind of the having empathy for the users, having empathy for the others that are coming to the table in order to maximize again the potential of achieving the mission. And so as I think of the mission that we all have gathered here, people within the World Economic Forum, I understand you personally as well. You know, again, I come back to the SDGs and the mission critical that we have together to achieve it. And I understand from your perspective, Simon, that now you're spending something that from a number was kind of shocking that you're spending 75 to 80% of your time thinking about sustainability and acting about sustainability and also thinking. And so it's, it's a very unusual thing to think because many corporations, right, would imagine or many people would imagine like Salesforce, you know, why is Salesforce thinking about sustainability? And me personally, I think every corporate should be thinking about sustainability, if it thinks wider and more nuanced. But I would love to hear from your perspective, Simon, what are you thinking about? What is Salesforce thinking about? And what does the future look like as companies start thinking about sustainability? Yeah, I mean, it's just a very, very important subject. It's just something I've been spending a lot of time on recently, not least because we have a great partnership with the World Economic Forum, the uplink platform is built on Salesforce. But maybe more broadly than that, we have a compelling event of the SDGs pointing to by 2030, if we have not really got our act together, then two thirds of the biodiversity, the natural capital will have been, you know, killed by a world that is not designed, a business world which is not designed to fit into this natural world. And we know that there's this kind of critical issue that we need to address, but the world is still marching as business as usual. I spent a lot of time focusing on digital transformation, how organizations which are still actually analog by design need to transition to digital. COVID has massively accelerated that. So the logical question is, okay, well, what happens after digital transformation? And it turns out that the next biggest change probably bigger, much bigger than digital transformation will be this major shift to what has to be a low carbon economy. If not, then we might as well just forget because there'll be no future story anyway. So this is big shift to the low carbon economy that has to happen. That is already impacting the capital markets. Massive, trillions of dollars are already moving towards more sustainable businesses. Unsustainable businesses are already being penalized. Regulatory systems are already pointing to, if not already moving towards at least getting companies to divulge their carbon footprint and it'll go beyond that. Business leaders are already moving in this direction, not just individually, but in groups, the business round table, the world economic forums doing. There's this major revolution that is potentially about to happen, but it might not. It could fall flat unless there's real momentum from business and that's an opportunity for us. It's an opportunity for all of us. How do we connect the business, how do we connect sustainability to the growth agenda? And if we get that right, it's a growth opportunity for everyone. So it's natural that we'll be thinking about it how can we help the world's future retailers, bankers, manufacturers, etc become sustainable, because those that don't will be relevant in the future. It's a growth opportunity, so that's why we're focusing on it. And one very important point, it's the right thing to do as well. And it reminds me now that you mentioned about the right thing to do. I remember meeting Mark Benioff in San Francisco, actually in a YGL summit and a professor Schwab asked him to define leadership and he said, leadership is love. It blew everybody's mind, but that's the most succinct is we're doing this and this leadership and business leadership because of love and that's the why and that's the right thing to do. So we have very few minutes. I wish I could stay here. What I would like is for each one of you, so what's next? You guys have done, have had incredible experience in transformation at the systems level, at the company level, at the global level. How does somebody start? What's the first step? Somebody who just really doesn't see themselves as innovators, as creative, as systems thinker, what would be one recommendation that people can take from your experience perhaps? Yeah. I love that question. Firstly, it's just do it. It's that easy. You're born as an innovator, you've just got to do it. But something I always like to remind myself, especially in conversations like this, it can be very serious what we're talking about. The importance of the why, very serious. When we talk about the how, it can be very serious. It can be involve regulation, governments, incentives, shareholder action. They can be very serious topics. And for me, the how is so important. Why are we on this earth? What's happening for you today? What's happening for you tomorrow? How is so important? And so having fun, I know that it's often not something that we talk about, but having fun is important because we are humans. We're not innovation robots. We're not here to innovate. We're humans. And when you talk about love in leadership, it's a very human quality. And having fun is a very human quality. And so I think that for me, our data scientists love playing in our data sets. We have data sets on natural ecosystems that nobody on earth has ever seen before. It's an AI engineers playground. You just get to, you get to have fun in it. Like, look what we can see. And whether it's a snake and trying to figure out, correlate whether a human walked past that snake and how close did they get, it's about having fun. And so when people think about starting innovation, either within a large organization or a government or starting a startup, it's about saying, well, choosing the right topic, the right path of why, choose the right problem. Don't go after a problem that is too small. Just be brave, go after a big problem that has meaning. And then choose the right people to have fun with and the right solutions to have fun with. I'm an engineer. So of course it's like, let's have fun with this tech. Let's make this an exciting life because it is your life that you're committing to. So that's, that's my advice is, you know, choose the right problem and choose the right people to have a good time with to solve, solve these big problems. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Simon. My Susan, I would kind of follow that up by, I don't know why it's important. Like, be really clear what problem you're trying to solve. Really, really, really clear. Get that, get that right. Get the narrative in place that describes the problem you're solving, how you're going to do it so that you can communicate it to others and get others to join you on your mission. If you can't articulate it as a compelling narrative, as a story, it'll be hard to do it because you'll just be on your own. And then get going. Tactics drive strategy. Don't build an all-encompassing, high-faluted strategy. Just get going. Tactics, your tactics, the feedback you get will drive your next steps. That's incredible advice. And I need to summarize it, but I think everything you have said, it's just wonderful. Susan, one of my favorite quotes, and I'm going to butcher it, it says, do not invite me to your revolution if I cannot dance. So I agree with you on the fun part of the creation and playfulness, but to sum it up, basically, I think we all share, and I think the audience obviously share, and anybody who's been around the World Economic Forum, like we have been, there's a true sense of urgency, right? This knowledge that there's these challenges, there's a deadline, and it's a possibility, and it's a solution. The solutions exist. We know what we have to do. We need love. We need, you know, obviously, innovation, and we just need to get going. I like what you said, Simon. We know the future story, right? So now it's up to us to make sure that it doesn't go the wrong way. Having a beginner's mind is crucial. Understanding the power of words and how do you see yourself in the innovation chain, so to speak, from doing to being, to enabling, to catalyzing, and the moment is now. So it is very much a pleasure to have been throughout this whole week with you, Simon, and Susan, getting ready. And I'm so grateful that you have shared your experiences, your time, and your love with all of us today. So thank you so much.