Sustainable Business

Interview Hugo Spowers, Riversimple 3/4 is a major technology disruption which will be very hard for the incumbent large car companies. Spowers realised that the problem is one of system integration, a skill at which motor racing teams excel; paradoxically, such step changes require much smaller teams and budgets than optimising mature technologies. "It is easier to drive this step change from outside the industry than from inside," he says. The technology of Riversimple may change the industry, but it is the other aspects of the company that make it a really interesting player in sustainability. The business model has sustainability at its core to such an extent that instead of optimising the company in isolation, they have rewritten the way the industry operates. Instead of making cars and selling them into the market, Riversimple will sell mobility, retaining ownership of the cars. Those familiar with cradle-to-cradle sustainable manufacturing will understand the logic that ultimate sustainability is not simply through design for recycling, but through selling the service not the product. Here is a company that has put the theory into business strategy. The business plan may be bold, but it is the company's corporate governance that is really interesting. Spowers explains that he looked into employee ownership but, "I thought this is a step in the right direction but still not representative of society's interests and there is no satisfactory way to bring in capital. That was the point when nt to us that It is importa take the people do not ronmental vi car out of enause they guilt but bec l gets want it. If it al green and evangelicallly had it e worthy, you'v I decided that we had to develop a multiple stakeholder partnership and decouple equity and control." The governance system is designed to balance and protect the benefit streams of a number of stakeholders represented by the partners, only one of which is the investors, and they have no primacy over the other stakeholder groups. Profits will still go to the shareholders but the control of the company is in the hands of the partners. I wanted to know what his investors think of having their control diluted in this way. "You have to have the right investors, but not altruistic investors; we have developed this model with our early investors, and for them it is one of the key reasons they have invested. They have to appreciate the advantages of a different model, designed to make more money by pursuing the interests of society, and thus earning the goodwill of all those on whom the success of the company depends, than by subordinating those interests to those of shareholders." Another important question, will customers want your offering? "I know that people don't feel they have the luxury to think too much about the greater good. Our approach is that we want to offer people something that appeals more and better meets their needs than the standard thing. It is important to us that people do not take the car from environmental guilt but because they want it. If it all gets evangelically green and worthy, you've had it.

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