By Josh Kimball
What’s Happening
• Get this goat story: Google has rented goats from California Grazing as a greener way to trim the weeds and grass in fields around its corporate headquarters.
• The goats are a way to naturally trim the green around the GOOG with a smaller carbon footprint than traditional lawnmowers. Critics, though, have raised questions about how eco-friendly transporting the herd to the Googleplex is.
• According to Google, the goats cost about the same as a landscape crew would, and will be brought in once a year to clear and fertilize the property. The enormous search company also touts the goats’ “cuteness” as one factor in their winning the job.
What This Means to Business
• Sometimes innovation means turning to the retro as consumers and companies embrace values of responsibility and creativity to solve problems.
• Innovation in the sustainability space has increasingly been built on adapting practices from the past to modern purposes, even if they at first seem off-the-wall.
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