Innovation for sustainability 11. Kyle Grant

Kyle Grant is Founder at Oxwash, an on-demand and laundry service made simple and sustainable (LinkedIn).

Our conversation covers:
-The role of a start-up CEO.
-Transfering the skills of a NASA Life support systems engineer to laundry.
-How Oxwash can be the operational back-end of many circular fashion companies, and so is (1) an example platform business and (2) a pocket of a possible ‘access economy’, where people don’t own things but have access to them (as many people do with music and Spotify now).
-Oxwash expansion plans are both more physical business in the UK and licencing IP overseas (as Ocado has done with online groceries).
-Innovating how clothes are dried, from heat to sound.
-How companies can be satisfied with ‘local maxima’, and so stay with technology and techniques which are not the best they could be. (Think of that as accepting the view from the top of a hill when there is a mountain a bit further along the path.)
-The value of going through process of doing the B-Corp accreditation, as a way to learn good practices which have been codified into a standard.
-How a carbon price would provide a level playing field.
-The different innovation approaches they have adopted: from Agile to NASA’s Technology Readiness Levels and Toyota’s Lean Management.

This is part of a series of interviews about innovation for sustainability conducted for the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources, as a contribution to a module in this Masters. You can find out more about these interviews, and the module, here.