At what size is your company too big to innovate?

It's an interesting question, especially because as of this year, my company, Method, hits the 10-year-old mark. To many Method employees (especially those who were here during the startup days, with our office furniture made from milk crates and rental cars as hotel rooms), it feels like we've become a company "of a certain age." But compared with the established giants of the cleaning products industry, 10 years old is decidedly adolescent.

It is this adolescence, though, that shapes our appetite for change and our ability to innovate. Small companies have an inherent bias to try to change the game, where large ones have the opposite -- a bias to maintain the status quo in which they grew.

The relevance of this to sustainability professionals is that real solutions to social and environmental problems will require radical, disruptive change -- exactly the type of strategy that serves the Davids in a world of CPG goliaths. The incremental, risk-managed evolutions typical of many large companies will seldom make effective responses to the massive problems like global warming or biodiversity loss.

Scale, it seems, is a roadblock to innovation for sustainability.

Misters Procter and Gamble started making soap in 1837. The Lever Brothers started their business in 1885. And SC Johnson started his floor cleaning company in 1886. During the days of the horse-drawn carriage and newly emerging steam engine technology, these were assuredly very entrepreneurial and innovative businesses, eagerly looking to change their categories, products, and industries. Over more than a century, though, attitudes towards to opportunity and risk forcibly change.

Large, global companies, with considerable resources and established user bases, have scale as an advantage in their efforts at sustainability. But they have one major disadvantage: a bias in favor of the status quo.

Companies with dominant, well-recognized and consistently profitable products have a strong disincentive to change. Major product innovations carry an inherent risk to these established successes, and as such, the companies that make them face a bias discouraging tampering with their format, consumer proposition, or product composition.