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it's all about innovation and some of the possibilities as to what we can do uh are quite staggering you've got to start somewhere and do some things and then see what that leads you to the next activity

hello and welcome today i'm very excited to be joined by ian caveney head of tech for good at bt so ian thank you so much for joining me today um please introduce yourself and tell me what do you do as head head of tech for good i generally describe it as a bit of a business development role um i work within the digital impacted sustainability team at bt which essentially is a csr team but my my role is very interested in the censor i'm there to drive tech innovation within the different parts of bt that essentially can deliver positive environmental outputs or can deliver positive societal impacts why do you do this there's there's a million things you could be doing but what brought you here the bulk of my background has actually been in in brand strategy and and advertising and communications um and i suppose it's back actually working on the launch of the ee brand uh back in 2012 where actually my eyes started to be open to the idea of purpose and responsibility and and i think that was part of the fact that we were really looking to embed the idea of uh you know responsibility and sustainability into the ee brand at that time and then from that the classic thing one thing led to another so when an opportunity came to actually take up and lead the sustainability team at ee i would sort of thought this is a once lifetime opportunity to sort of take a sideways move into a new area i've i've kind of sort of forged this air of belief you know the technology that telecoms providers deliver has a great ability to sort of have the transformative impact on on people in communities and society as a whole so i think it's kind of always been something that i've been being a tech optimist i've really focused on that what is it that you hope to be able to contribute to to the global to the global kind of um race towards these wonderfully colored charts which one really excites you and you think's most passionately about well i i think it's interesting i mean over time i've really got to focus on on the climate crisis um and i think that's you know there's lots of issues that we need to address across the world but i think you know fundamentally and personally for me the climate crisis is fundamentally so entwined with everything else that if we don't get that thing right then none of the other sdgs are really potentially going to matter in my role we've got a clear focus on climate action for the organization as a whole has been a climate leadership organization for a number of years so we've got the backing and support in the business to drive activities in that area and you know it's it's a bit cheesy but it's that simple thing of you know i want to make sure that you know i can let my kids in my eye in the eye when i'm older and say look i was there trying to solve things about the climate crisis i was just carrying on blindly doing nothing about it i sort of really tried to sort of do the best i can with the role i've got and it's all about innovation and some of the possibilities as to what we can do are quite staggering um but but it's yeah it's about you know you've got to start somewhere and do some things and then see what that leads you to the next activity how do you see you know people looking at you at telecoms trying to do tech for good and do you have to explain it much or do you have to talk about the things you enable yeah well i think the whole enablement piece is the critical part of it and i think you know you've hit a nail on the head there which is you know the the mobile networks the fit networks at telecoms providers across the globe provide are essentially that that backbone that platform that other people can then build upon to to deliver the tech solutions um and a lot of it is about how you as a telecoms company can either accelerate activity in those spaces how you can sort of create opportunities for that i mean a lot of the work that bt has done over time has sort of focused on the climate impact of its products and services so that positive carbon target that we had at the bt which we actually um met last year actually in the whole sense of you know every one of carbon that bt produces it enables our customers to save three times that amount for the products and services through video conferencing through other elements so you know that that kind of enablement element is there a lot of work i've been doing in the last 12 months is that it can't be climate on its own it has to be climate impact as well as broader business benefits that you're delivering uh wherever possible um and i think that whole commercial lens to it is is essential um otherwise you know it's technically good activity is going to be reliant on flat philanthropic funding or that kind of thing and that that's not going to drive the systematic change that that's required so a lot of my work you know although i come from the sustainability team actually has an over commercial lens to it because it has to have value and it has to have you know longevity and to be able to fund itself you're selling things that have a positive impact of its profit with purpose you know you know that that is a key thing i believe it is that yeah you can get the two things where you can deliver profit but you can also have a positive impact at the same time and i think that the whole ground swelling esg from the investor community as well is absolutely leading that and yeah i suppose having that buy-in and support from the top of the house so you know this is something whereby the ceo the chairman believe in in what it is that we're doing here and it's embedded into the overall business strategy actually in the sense of you know what bt should deliver it should be helping to deliver a bright sustainable future that's we've got the i suppose the license to do what we want what we need to do um tricky bit though is is making it happen as you probably know in any organization it's great to have words on powerpoint decks and to have a nice purpose and then do all these sort of things but driving that within a commercial organization and driving that with people who often have a lot of short-term targets it can be tricky but you know i have to say people are open to it um people realize that there's a reason why we should be doing these sort of things and and yeah so it's just that a process and a journey that that business like bt is going on is this for good movement and kind of momentum particularly with the esg funding that you mentioned is it different today than it was csr you know 10 15 years ago yeah i really believe it is i think that the you know organization like bt it can be a transformational organization in the uk for example you know we're making a once-in-a-lifetime investment in the uk's broadband infrastructure and mobile infrastructure and the idea of profit with purpose i think is again sort of if you don't have sustainability embedded in the overall company strategy which again to be fair we've really probably only just cracked that in the last 12 months that it appears it's not just a kind of oh and we do sustainability by the way it is no it's it's on there on the the one slider that that covers the overall strategy and you're getting lots of questions from the investors you know where you're going hard enough you go fast enough how are you embedding that into the business and you know it is to say it's still something that if you spoke to most people in the business they wouldn't necessarily realize that some of what they're doing is driving change but actually it is um but i think it's sometimes that realization of people can do more themselves within a business now any sustainability or csr team as it may be still called is only going to be a few people you know and then if i take bt you know it's over 100 000 people so we as ourselves aren't going to manage and deliver everything we have to look at how we embed that change how we embed that work within the business and essentially that's really kind of i go back to describe my role as a business development role is kind of looking at how we can create right circumstances or the right opportunities to do tech like this but then the idea is once you've proved the opportunity to improve the case for it then there's nothing to stop the different parts of the business to take ownership and drive it forward you're not just disseminating ownership of those goals but almost decentralizing it across the business are you yeah well exactly it's kind of again a csr team kind of can argue that they they don't have to exist they've done their job because everything that needs to be done within the business embedded and i think no that's that's not going to happen you always need people to to have specialities and skills to drive this agenda and then this this theme but it's yeah embedding and getting people to realize you know that it's they can exact the change i mean one of the examples i use is that one of the major projects i'm working on the moment which is the thing called a green tech innovation platform part of the the outcome we're driving to is that uh different uh commercial parts of the business will be delivering propositions now that's their job in the business is to deliver propositions my job in the sustainability team is not to do that but i need them to deliver those propositions that have those positive or environmental impacts as well as the broader business benefits so it's kind of that thing of you you're shepherding and moving and and you know i was about to say coercing that that's maybe not the right word but but kind of you know sort of directing that's yes that's probably a bit of a better fair way of doing it but but it and but it is and actually it definitely isn't coercing as well actually just to come back to that point in the sense of if if you want i can make uh make a banner a piece of awesome here and says definitely not coercing that well i think we i mean i could probably say in a sense i think about when i started some of the work i was doing 12 months ago talking about the importance of the climate action and just need to do things and that was even pre recovered i didn't have anybody questioning that the issue of climate as being something that's not there um i think the biggest question was yeah so how do we do it is how do we drive this food how how can we make a difference and and i think you know that is um yeah as i said a couple of times already that that's kind of a challenge just it's what i enjoy actually it's it's driving change and then seeing things evolve and and seeing you tech is also dead exciting as well so it's kind of about that that's why i love it tell me about a project you've been working on that you're really enjoying and why what i persecuted and sort of building on my brand background is actually how do you make that tech more interesting easily understood how do you position it in a way that makes it more compelling and exciting for people to to want to buy to want to use um and so that that angle is is really interesting the second bit with the green tech innovation platform is this idea of partnerships and recognizing that you know bt on its own cannot solve all the problems that its customers need to be solved so the idea is that we look outside of our organization and think about what are the types of organizations who we can partner with to help develop new products and services to augment our existing network provision and you know working that partnership then with customers living proof of concepts building on that and then the idea of scaling something out after that is it's super exciting who do you want to reach to invite them to come and work with you working very closely with an organization called plug and play a sitting valley-based organization essentially drive a lot of innovation that they support and fund a lot of early stage and scale-up organizations but then on the other side what they do they work with a number of large corporates in terms of driving innovation agenda so they kind of meld both the corporate and the innovation community together um and they've been a sort of key partner on the whole green tech platform work around helping a scout helping us find who's out there but then sort of driving that process towards um you know proof of concepts and things which is essentially um we're at now we had an events uh back into january where we launched the two partnerships has come from that work and now um was positive actually had quite a few inquiries about proof of concept opportunities and now sort of in the following weeks we've just been having discussions with a lot of public sector customers here in the uk from a uh general john or jane on the street how are they going to start to see the impact of the work that you're doing how does that filter down out through these partnerships into our lives some of it they might not notice which is sometimes great in the sense of hopeless things to happen in the background um i think one example so i'll talk about biops um so they are one of the partners we we've signed up for the green tech innovation platform eric glargo glasgow based scale up and essentially what they offer is a iot solution for social housing so essentially what they're able to do is to install sensors into housing which will measure damp mold um you know heat etc and from that you can basically um essentially and they even sort of understand issues around fuel poverty et cetera is a big important issue and and as part of their solution what what they also have is is a app they've developed which is uh you know can actually act as a communicating uh opportunity to tenants because issues of costs of you know damp and those sort of things if you're able to stop them earlier but then you know you as a social housing provider can save literally thousands and millions of pounds so so the idea is that there's a preventative maintenance element to it but then also there's a actual element around having better communication with your tenants you know you're not sending engineers out to check things that they don't need to check so you're reducing travel um so that there's lots of you know and these are all when you add up the kind of the sort of business case benefits around you know preventative maintenance savings etc along with the environmental benefits what you then start to build up is you know a massively good reason to to actually drive these sort of solutions forward air quality is a thing i've been spending a lot of time on um and having a lot of conversations on i've got this one over here the flow yeah i built my own uh as well and from my old we met originally when i was at root metrics so taking some of those concepts i was working on an idea of almost decentralized hyper local air quality monitoring one of the interesting things i think that will happen within climate over the next three to five years is the whole climate finance side of things which will open up again going back to the investment side what's going to drive it is is that um you know i'm not a raging capitalist but at the same time the money does drive a lot of action so the fact if if that there's people going to need to uh invest in green activities to avoid paying too much in tax etc then that's going to lead the regulatory things is going to lead things in a certain way and that equally better regulation around climate finance that kind of thing is also going to give people confidence to do more in that space because yeah there are always going to be companies that you know airline sector i don't think we're going to have a an electric boeing 747 anytime soon so are we my first interview if you're watching this go and have a look at youtube is with a company called electric sky and they are working on beaming electricity into the planes um very it's fascinating

but it is you know there is you know there are going to be people are going to need to use offsets in relation to their climate activities how do you make finance tied to your environmental impact or your purpose or your impact on any of these maybe yeah um real genuine change is going to be very difficult that will drive the action you need those government leaders you need those sort of banking investment leave is happening we live in a catalyst world so if you're going to make change it needs to align with the world you live in if somebody was asking you you know where should i go you know to get to get inspired to do some good um how can i get involved what would you offer them as some words of wisdom or some inspirational pointers look at different sort of tech blogs i mean the stuff you're doing it's got it's sort of that sort of stuff for me i think that that's a good place to start i think what i find interesting one of the things again one of the projects i work on so i'll do a quick plug on it is um the thing that actually bt have been working with an organization called abilitynet and uh we've been running something called the tap for good awards for the last 10 years so two years ago a nine-year-old girl called me hika sharma she came up with an idea of a smart stick for people who have sight loss um now there are already um smart sticks on the market for people's titles but mohika designed hers in a very specific way sort of looking at a very user-led approach to it and and so since her winning the award with that i've been working with but more importantly working with the rnib in the uk which is the main character that works with people with sight loss i'm actually looking to see how we can help develop her idea and almost bring it to market so um let's think a little bit into the future um these these goals are quite ambitious and quite enormous we don't really have a huge amount of time to deliver on these so what what are you what are you hoping will change from a regulatory point of view from a policy point of view from just day-to-day business in order to help you achieve you know the progress that you want to achieve against these i think you do need the governments and the leaders to set ambitious targets and and to drive you know change um but again it's got to come from in the businesses itself that you know companies have got to look at themselves and think right actually if you don't do something about the way we operate we might have might not even be here in five to ten years so about that kind of need to drive i think what what is maybe a bit of a gap is it's quite maybe it's nice and easy to say these things when you're working for a big blue chip organization like bt and then you've got those big functions you know what would you do if you're an sme you know you've got it's hard enough to keep your head above water let alone worry about things like your environmental sustainability credentials et cetera but i think you know supporting and where games where governments can make differences exactly in that space is giving more guidance and more support to to companies to explain why it's important so before we wrap up let me just remind anybody who if you've enjoyed this video please hit like and subscribe and all that general youtube stuff that you have to do and then it's just remains for me to say ian thank you so much um for joining me this has been really good and um yeah thank you for your time thank you scott for the best