Driving Sustainability: Green’Ovation champions aim to gamify your carbon footprint

In this series, the Rakuten Today team sits down with leaders working on sustainability across the Rakuten Group to better understand their organization’s mission and how they are driving Rakuten’s vision of a sustainable future for all.

To make a positive impact as a group, you need to spark action on an individual level – this idea was behind the winning pitch of Rakuten’s inaugural Green’Ovation Challenge.

The challenge was held over several months in late 2022 by Rakuten in Europe, celebrating Rakuten’s 25th anniversary theme of Tech & Green. Some 65 Greenovators from six countries joined the event, forming 16 teams that spanned 10 different business units. After battling it out over several rounds, four teams were selected to meet in Paris, where they pitched their ideas to a final jury of Rakuten leaders.

Rakuten’s very first Green’Ovation award went to Team Go Green Together, made up of Andrea Anabitarte, Marisa Prieto Flores, and Giovanni Perrucci of Rakuten’s Open E-commerce business, and Justyna Borowiec from the Rakuten Advertising Corporate Strategy Team.

We sat down with four of these Greenovators to find out just how they plan to reduce Rakuten’s carbon footprint.

Gamifying and socializing your carbon footprint

Giovanni Perrucci’s Green’Ovation journey began when the challenge was announced at Asakai, Rakuten’s weekly all-hands meeting.

“I knew I wanted to take part, because I had an interest in creating an impact on sustainability in the workplace. So I started collecting people,” he laughs. Perrucci approached his teammates-to-be – four other Rakutenians from different business units in Rakuten’s Berlin office – and convinced them to form a team.

They gave themselves a name – Team Go Green Together – and got to work on their idea.

“Our idea was an app for employees that shows the small steps we can take every day to reduce our carbon footprint,” Perrucci explains. “Not just at work, but in our everyday lives.”

“We were asking questions like, how can we be more sustainable? How can we measure our sustainability efforts, and how can we do it in a way that’s motivating?”

Giovanni Perrucci, Senior CRM Manager, Rakuten Open E-commerce

Marisa Prieto Flores designed the app’s interface.

“It starts with a questionnaire, and your carbon footprint is calculated based on your answers. You have to reduce it in various categories,” she explains.  

Logging the actions you take would earn you positive or negative points, depending on the carbon output. The team proposed making use of Rakuten Points, which employees could use to make purchases or use services within the Rakuten Ecosystem, providing an extra incentive to be green.

But the team imagined the app as much more than a simple logbook.

“Another very important aspect is the social interaction,” Perrucci reveals. “You can interact with your colleagues and also compete with them to be sustainable.”

Prieto Flores elaborates: “You go to the social tab and share what you did that morning, and other colleagues can see that you came to the office by bicycle, and leave a comment,” she explains. “We can even create rankings of the different offices, so that you can see who is the most sustainable.”

The finalists’ pitches were judged on business impact, feasibility, scalability, and innovation. Feasibility was one area Team Go Green Together excelled by proposing that they make use of existing assets – namely, an internal app designed for Rakuten employees to educate themselves on environmental topics.

“There were the cost savings that came from building it on an existing app,” says Justyna Borowiec. “Many of the other ideas were about building a new product from scratch, which would need lots of development resources.”

Social engagement to spark real actions

The decision to make social interaction a core function of the app proved to be a powerful one.

“We were asking questions like, how can we be more sustainable? How can we measure our sustainability efforts, and how can we do it in a way that’s motivating?” Perrucci recalls. “And above all, how can we have an impact as a group? The idea came about by asking these questions in the framework that is our workplace.”

“We didn’t want to have something that you do only as an individual,” Borowiec adds. “We wanted to have a social aspect, something that connects people.”

This social aspect, this gamification allows me to see how I can be more sustainable, the actions I can take to contribute.”

Andrea Anabitarte, Content Manager, Rakuten Open E-Commerce

Borowiec believes that this social aspect was particularly important in their geographical context. “In Europe, we have a lot of different business units that are not really that connected. I think our idea has the potential to stimulate connections, collaboration, and communication.”

But perhaps the pitch’s biggest draw lies in the way that this social engagement works to drive real-world actions for real-world results.

“Every time you take an action, you can share this action in the app,” Prieto Flores says. “So other people can see what you did, and you can encourage other people to do the same.”

This not only allows for mutual encouragement, but also provides a valuable starting point for those who want to reduce their carbon footprint but don’t know where to begin.

“We need to be more educated on what we can do, the little steps we can take,” stresses Andrea Anabitarte. “The current app had educational functions, but our app could link this to concrete actions. You have friends and colleagues all around you sharing the different actions they are taking. This social aspect, this gamification allows me to see how I can be more sustainable, the actions I can take to contribute.”

A happy collision of diverse talent

Rakuten’s trailblazing Green’Ovation champions credit their victory to the cross-company connections that they forged during the challenge. Perrucci highlights how the requirement for team members to be from different departments brought together diverse talent and encouraged everyone to make the most of each other’s abilities.

“We had a clear idea of the product we wanted to deliver, and we relied on our individual strengths,” he says. “For instance, Marisa (Prieto Flores) is a very good UX designer, so she did the mockup. We each come from different backgrounds, and we all made our own contributions.”

Prieto Flores encourages other Rakuten employees to make the most of opportunities for collaborating with people from diverse backgrounds.

“Try to work with people who are not in the same office,” she advises. “Imagine getting to work with someone you would otherwise never be able to work with, like in Barcelona or in Luxembourg. It’s really nice.”

When the project requirements exceeded the team’s individual capabilities, the Greenovators were forced to venture outwards for the expertise they required, forging connections with other businesses and offices of Rakuten in Europe.

One area where this requirement became apparent was in estimating development costs. If they were to take advantage of the fact that they were building on an existing app, accurate cost estimates would be crucial for their pitch.

“We are not product managers, so we had to reach out and contact other people for help with the parts we didn’t know,” says Anabitarte. “We would seek out these people, ask questions, and get the help we need. Meeting these people, finding out how everything works, and coming back and putting all that knowledge together – it was a very good learning experience.”

Borowiec agrees: “Meeting with and learning from people in other departments is what will help you create a presentation that’s more compelling, and an idea that’s more innovative.”

Turning passion into impact

“We believe in this idea, and we think it’s very innovative. We can actually take something that is there and make it better, all of us working together,” Anabitarte says. “It’s incredible to be able to see the whole process and then develop the idea.”

Borowiec also appreciates the experience of taking charge of a project from start to finish – an opportunity that often isn’t available when working in a large company.

“Often you work on a certain piece of the whole project,” she explains. “You rarely have the opportunity to start something and finish it, believing in the entire thing as a group. You take responsibility not only for one part, but the whole thing, all contributing together.”

For Prieto Flores, the challenge has resulted in the blossoming of a new passion, and a change in career path.

“I am the social media manager of Open E-commerce,” she says. “Working the mockup and doing the UX design for this project, I realized I wanted to be a designer. So now I’m doing my training to become a designer, thanks to this project.”

Perrucci has a couple of messages he wants to pass on to future Greenovators.

“The first one is to pay a lot of attention to what’s happening around you, and see what type of problems there are that really affect you, and affect other people. Start there, and ask yourself, is there something that I can solve?” he proposes. “The second one is to give a lot of importance to diversity. The more diverse people you have in a group, the more skills you have, and the better the outcome will be.”