Can your company become one of the next "next billion?"This is an excerpt from the book “Green Giants: How Smart Companies Turn Sustainability into Billion-Dollar Businesses.”“[The CEO] thinks Tesla could be a big disrupter if we’re not careful. History is littered with big companies that ignored innovation that was coming their way because you didn’t know where you could be disrupted.” — GM spokesperson For “Green Giants,” sustainability is the springboard to innovation. These companies are not introducing incremental improvement or a greener, moreethical, socially responsible variation on the status quo. Instead, they are implementing some of the most disruptive and successful business innovations of the past decade. It’s the kind of innovation that has made all of the Green Giants regulars on the Fast Company or Forbes lists of the World’s Most Innovative Companies over the past four years.It’s a surprising change from the early days of green marketing, when many manufacturers created products that were often less sophisticated and less effective than standard product lines, called them “eco_______,” and packaged them in burlap. No wonder that when many people think of green products, they envision bathroom cleaner that doesn’t clean, deodorant that doesn’t deodorize, and toilet paper that is the hair shirt to Cottonelle’s cashmere. To them “sustainable” has come to mean primitive, rudimentary,unsophisticated, and low-tech.Green Giant products are the polar opposite of primitive. Each of the companies is founded on innovation that disrupted a category, and innovation pervades their cultures. Disruptive Innovation, then, is the second characteristic of Green Giants. They embrace sustainability as a spur to develop radically better products and services, reinvent categories, unlock new sources of revenue, and in the process leapfrog less innovative incumbents.The Green Giants have disrupted the fast food, automotive, supermarket,infrastructure, apparel, and beauty industries, while the Next Billions are taking on eyewear, cleaning products, ice cream, yogurt, and hospitality. This type of innovation isn’t just about product. It’s about supply chains,technology, business models — and entire systems.