Responsibility and ethics of innovations

When we last discussed our innovation, we conducted an analysis to determine if they would be easy or difficult to implement for the company and what impact they would have.

To restate our ideas:
With adding treadmills to shops, customers can try out shoes to get a better feeling. With that we can eliminate a possibility that a customer will need to return a product afterwards, because of unexpected problems.

Our second idea is adding screens to stores, where customers can learn about how to properly care for their shoes in order to make them last longer.

In order to determine whether our ideas would be actually beneficial for the company, we – in addition to the initial idea validation – also had to think about how whether they were ethically and socially responsible ideas, or whether they would be a complete disaster for society. Read on to find out our conclusion…

Treadmills
We believe that this idea can very easily fulfill a social responsibility of encouraging people to be healthy and exercise more. Someone might buy a pair of sports shoes because they look cool or feel nice based on taking a few steps in the store, but later find out when they try to put the shoes to use that they are terrible for actually exercising in. Then they feel less motivated to exercise, they fail their New Years resolutions to exercise more, and their whole life falls apart… (maybe not so dramatically, but they may at least feel frustrated).

Allowing customers the chance to try on how the shoes feel when on a treadmill would therefore hopefully help minimize the risk that they buy shoes they are dissatisfied with, and help them stay on track with exercising.

Regarding ethics, the main concern would be whether customers would get hurt on the treadmills – this risk (including legal risk to the company if someone does get hurt) could be minimized by putting up hazard signs and by having an employee stationed to pay attention to the treadmills to help avoid accidents.

Screens
These screens also fulfill a social responsibility – namely, helping move towards a more sustainable business model where value is placed on buying items that will last for a long time, rather than buying things that will be thrown away and replaced as soon as they have some defect.
Since this second, more wasteful business model is the current norm in society, many customers may not know how to care for shoes properly. We believe that our initiative to educate them about this can help normalize taking better care of the things that we buy, and as this idea becomes more normalized other companies are likely to follow the trend.

Ethically, we again can’t see many issues that would arise here – however, since, as we mentioned, replacing items is more normalized as it creates higher profit for companies, it might be important for the company to make sure that this initiative does not turn into greenwashing and customers are actively encouraged to take care of their shoes.

In one sentence, what does this mean?
We believe that our innovations would be low-risk and carry high benefits for the company – they highlight eco-friendly goals and do not pose any huge ethical dangers to the company.