Sustainability challenges drive innovation, yet few studies attend to the role of design to realise innovation. This paper report from a full day workshop and panel discussion with 100 delegates at the ICED 2021 conference. Industrialists, academics and societal representatives discussed how to deal with five conflicting themes. It is argued that innovation actors will need to take a joint action to the problem, industrial value chains need to co-innovate and that long term challenging targets are powerful metrics to drive transformation.