Creating smart and sustainable connected living

To focus our efforts and help us fulfil our purpose of crafting lovable futures, we have summarised the challenges we believe represent our biggest potential positive impacts into three main missions for EGGS. One of them is ‘Smart and sustainable connected living’. It’s about designing smart, sustainable solutions for what we do in our everyday lives - travelling to work, going to the store, fixing our house, and having fun.

The new product is a service

When you choose to rent an electric kick-bike instead of taking your car, or choose to borrow a book instead of buying a new one, you’re choosing to use a service instead of buying a product. This provides you with a good experience, all while consuming less material resources. This is part of a bigger trend, where we’re moving from a linear to a circular economy – from products to services - where sharing, leasing or renting overtakes the buying and selling concept.

One example of this is the BetterColiving project we’re working on together with IKEA. The idea is to offer students and others who live in a collective an immaterial service, where the digital tool Sven helps them in their daily lives and facilitates living together.

Businesses need help transitioning to the new model

Transitioning to this new concept requires businesses to innovate and rethink their products. Obviously, this entails applying circular thinking when redesigning physical products to fit into circular value streams. But there is also a need for rethinking and redesigning whole business models. By using business design and design thinking and doing, we can help navigate the new consumer and market landscape and help companies handle the transition successfully. An example of success in this transition is our client Circle K.

Norway is leading on in the world on electric vehicle charging, and we’ve helped them design their client experience and transition from selling gasoline as a product to selling the service of electric charging.

When asked what a lovable future means to them, this is what people in EGGS answered.

Generating immaterial value

Bringing consumption down in general, and finding new ways of reusing and recycling materials brings resource usage down. Apart from being good for the planet, this is also good for business. Less material use – lower material cost. One central concept in these new business models where consumption and physical products are not the focus, will be to provide immaterial value to the consumer. That is – a positive experience, desirable values and a sense of well-being. In the years ahead, the companies that can deliver the strongest immaterial value to us as consumers, will be the winners. Being able to show a positive impact on the environment, or a positive social impact– through social investment, business models designed to generate immaterial value and return on investment that extend beyond profit – will be what differentiates the future businesses of success.

When we in EGGS work towards creating smart and sustainable connected living, we’ll be working with everything from physical and digital consumer products, banks and mobility services, to smart homes and social investment. What they all have in common is their desire to become beloved tools in our daily lives that can provide us options to lead better, more sustainable lives. We can help our clients do that.