Do you investigate and take into account potential negative external effects when designing your product or service?

Business as Usual denies or hides externalities

Volkswagen

The Volkswagen Dieselgate scandal is a clear example of how “Business as Usual” can hide externalities instead of addressing them. In this case, Volkswagen used software to manipulate emissions tests so that their diesel cars appeared far cleaner than they actually were. In reality, these vehicles were emitting far higher levels of nitrogen oxides than reported. This kind of pollution contributes directly to poor air quality and serious health impacts, including respiratory diseases.

What makes Dieselgate more than just a case of fraud is what it reveals about incentives. The system rewarded compliance on paper instead of taking responsibility for real-world consequences. The negative externalities, in this case public health and environmental damage, were effectively ignored as long as they remained outside the reporting framework. It shows how easily harm can be externalized when success is defined narrowly, and why “compliance” is not the same as responsibility.

Future Entrepreneurs integrate externalities into the design

Mob-ion

The French company Mob-ion offers a very different approach to mobility design; one that starts by refusing to ignore externalities in the first place. It develops lightweight, shareable electric and hydrogen mobility solutions such as scooters, but what sets them apart is not the technology alone. It’s the way environmental impact is built into the design process from the beginning.

Instead of treating emissions, energy use, and material waste as side effects to be “offset” later, Mob-ion integrates them directly into how the product is conceived. Life-cycle impact is considered upfront: from production and energy consumption to repairability, reuse, and end-of-life recycling. The goal is not just cleaner transport on paper, but a system that reduces both local emissions and material waste structurally.

This stands in contrast to “Business as Usual” approaches, where externalities are often calculated after the fact—or worse, left out of the equation entirely. Mob-ion’s model suggests a different mindset: if you design with full responsibility for impact from the start, you lessen the externalities related to your business model.

What you can do

If you want to internalize externalities in your design like a Future Entrepreneur, here are some practical tips:

• Make externalities a design requirement, not an afterthought
  Don’t treat environmental and social impacts as “side effects” to be measured later or offset with compensation. Instead, explicitly include them as design constraints alongside cost, performance, and scalability when developing your product or service.
• Map the full life cycle of your product or service
  Go beyond your direct operations and examine upstream and downstream impacts: sourcing of materials, production methods, energy use, distribution, customer use, and end-of-life disposal. Identify where hidden costs or harms may be shifting to society or the environment.
• Align success metrics with real-world outcomes, not just compliance
  Move beyond narrow indicators like regulatory approval or short-term profit. Build internal metrics that reflect actual impact (e.g. emissions, waste, health effects, repairability), and use them to guide decisions just as seriously as financial KPIs.