Identifying and evaluating State of the Art approaches to your problem

<aside> 💡 State of the Art examples are essentially the same as looking for relevant ‘case examples’ from other contexts

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<aside> 🎯 One way to find good ideas for tackling any problem you’re focusing on is to find examples in other contexts where your problem (or a problem similar to it) is already being tackled (hopefully effectively)! Analysing those examples for information you can use when selecting and developing your team’s proposed solution.

Whatever problem you have chose to tackle for your local context, you can be guaranteed that someone else will already have tried to tackle that problem somewhere else. Given that, shouldn’t you seek to learn from others’ successes and failures?

More broadly, tackling any sustainability challenge effectively and efficiently requires exploring how others are already addressing similar challenges. The ability to identify and analyse diverse State of the Art approaches across a wide range of contexts is an invaluable sustainability skill. (It is also an invaluable business and entrepreneurial skill, as it enables you to effectively map competitor landscapes, and to identify potential gaps within that landscape!)

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<aside> 🗺️ Finding State of the Art examples for your problem

The main point is this: you are going to need to do some research to find good examples of approaches to tackling your chosen problem in other locations. Just be sure as you do your research that you ensure you focus on credible sources and reliable data.

<aside> 💡 State of the Art examples can come from highly diverse contexts

In some cases, entrepreneurial startups might be the best State of the Art examples for your problem; in other cases, it might be research projects or government initiatives. The boundaries between public, private and research efforts are often blurry when it comes to sustainability challenges; and what works as a public sector initiative in one context might be best suited as an entrepreneurial venture in another.

When looking for your examples, we encourage you to cast your net wide to begin with. You might be surprised where the best ideas and inspirations come from for tackling your chosen problem in your specific context!

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<aside> 🗺️ Evaluating your State of the Art example(s)

When examining the State of the Art example(s) you have found, the single best place to start is with your own Design Criteria. This is because you (should) have already done the hard work of identifying the most important aspects of your problem that need to be addressed, and codifying those aspects in your Design Criteria.

Returning to the worked example in Guidance on Design (or ”Success”) Criteria, the Design Criteria of “[reducing] the amount of lead and cadmium measured in the local crops by at least 50%” provides a valuable metric against which State of the Art solutions found in other contexts can be evaluated. For instance, if a specific biochemical technique can remove 10% of the lead and cadmium each year, you can then determine how long that technique would take to effectively reach the target.

Of course, it isn’t about how well a State of the Art example achieves one of your Design Criteria, but how it measures up against all of them together.

In addition to your Design Criteria, you likely want to look carefully at the Four Dimensions for evaluating your proposed solution and consider how your State of the Art examples do against those four dimensions.

If these analyses identify some additional limitations or strengths that were not captured by your Design Criteria… you might want to iterate and evolve your Design Criteria!

<aside> 💡 Iterating and evolving your Design Criteria

When going through your analyses, you might find that your Design Criteria are very hard to meet, or perhaps that your Design Criteria are missing important aspects of the problem. Whatever the case might be, you can and should take the time to iterate and evolve your Design Criteria during this process.

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