The Great Convergence:
The Time For Change is Now
The Johnson School’s Stuart L. Hart thinks a lot about the 4 billion poorest people in the world. He considers how to solve their biggest problems — lack of clean drinking water, persistent hunger, degradation of the natural environment on which they depend. Yet unlike many policy makers who share his interest in bettering the lives of those living at the base of the pyramid, Hart believes the solutions to the world’s most pressing problems also offer sustainable, profit-making opportunities for business.
“The major opportunity and challenge of our time is to create a form of commerce that uplifts the entire human community of 6.5 billion in a way that respects both natural systems and cultural diversity,” says Hart, the Samuel C. Johnson Professor of Sustainable Global Enterprise. “This is the only realistic and viable pathway to a sustainable world. Business can, and must, lead the way.”
Hart’s vision is shared by the school’s Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise. The center frames the world’s social and environmental challenges as unmet market needs that can be addressed most appropriately through business innovation and entrepreneurship. Its research and teaching programs develop novel approaches for private enterprises to creatively address problems such as climate change, ecosystem degradation, and poverty — and make a profit doing it.
Venture capitalists caught on to clean tech as fast-growth investment opportunities, backing these enterprises with $8.4 billion in 2008, a 38-percent increase from 2007, according to data from the Cleantech Group.
Yet amid the buzz and flowing capital, the vast majority of investments in sustainable technology development targeted the top of the pyramid, says Hart. Companies doing enterprise development at the base of the pyramid had little contact with the booming clean-tech community, and vice versa.
“It seemed increasingly evident that these two communities didn’t connect in any significant way,” Hart says. “If you look downstream, that could have some significant consequences.”
The Cornell Global Forum aimed to do two things: bring 100 of the world’s leading entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, financiers, and change agents together to identify and begin implementing initiatives in what Hart terms the “great convergence” of clean technology and base-of-the-pyramid enterprise development, and to dramatically raise the visibility of the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise’s work in the “convergence” domain.
“I hope over time the Global Forum will move well down the path to being a well-established global institution — an ongoing, growing, thriving platform called the ‘convergence initiative’ that will produce a wide range of action projects and accelerate the rate of this kind of enterprise in the world,” Hart said.
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