"Everybody in the Pool of Green Innovation"

This article talks about businesses collaborating and sharing ideas of how to become more environmentally friendly. A lot of this gives thanks to the open-source software movement. With this, many different corporations are using these forums for sharing different environmentally friendly innovations and in turn this helps to build communities around them. The very first forum to create a community was the Eco-Patend Commons, which "was started in January 2008 by IBM, Nokia, Pitney Bowes and Sony in collaboration with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development." One thing I noticed about the different companies who are working with each other are that they are not competeing for consumers. Most of the companies are working in different lines of business. The article goes on to state the concept which is "companies pledge environmental patents to the commens, and anyone can use them - free." I believe this is all a really good idea because by sharing the different environmental technologies companies are developing it helps to maximize the social benefit without actually sacrificing their competitive strategy.



The following are a couple different examples the article gave.

• DuPont: "method for better detecting pollution in soil, air or water by using a microorganism that produces light when exposed to a pollutant." The picture to the right shows the sustainability goals DuPont wants to achieve by the year 2015. By doing this, DuPont will continue to improve its overall environmental impact and will also help other companies to improve theirs.

• Xerox: "removing toxic waste from contaminated groundwater, as well as a cleaning technique for semiconductor wafers from IBM that uses ozone gas and eliminates chemical contaminants that result from other processes.

Since the start of this, the commons has grown to 100 patents from 31, with 11 companies who are participating. There is also another commons called the Creative Commons which is "a nonprofit organization that previously developed licensing programs tohelp in sharing creative and scientific content," and it is planning to continue its efforts and take on environmental issues.

In early 2010, Nike and Best Buy plan to share an initiative called the Green Xchange. This is a program which will include both patented technologies and forums for continuing to exchange innovations. One of these innovations include Best Buy's system for rating the sustainability of a supply chain. The companies who choose to contribute in the Green Xchange have the right to either charge users a fixed annual licensing fee and restrict any licensing by rivals or for competitive use. No matter what they choose to do though all participating companies must register so there is a record of who is actually using what technology. One thing Nike came up with was their air-bag technology which they use in their shoes. This technology could be sold to non-competeing companies and could build a fairly large profit outside its normal business.

Overall, I found this article to be very interesting because it showed how different companies can all collaborate with each other to make a much better ending product. One company cannot accomplish everything so with the help of others they can all build on their products and lower their environmental impact. I understand not helping out the competition because you are essentially competing for the same consumer business, but by helping non-competitors you are lowering a much greater amount of environmental impact instead of only your own.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/business/01proto.html?_r=1&scp=6&sq=sustainability&st=cse