2009 Headlines
Global Forum Welcomes 100 Delegates from 20 Countries
World leaders in clean technology and base of the pyramid development gather to accelerate rate of "Great Convergence"
June 1, 2009 | Ithaca, NY | Professor Stuart Hart kicked off the Global Forum on Sustainable Enterprise on June 1 at the Museum of Natural History to a crowd of 100 invited pioneers in clean technology and base of the pyramid development, as well as over 100 Cornell alumni and friends.
David Skorton, President of Cornell University, provided an update on Cornell's progress in sustainability including an upgrade to the University's central heating that will utilize co-generation of heat and power and cut green house emissions by 20 percent and reduce coal emissions by 50 percent. L. Joseph Thomas, Anne and Elmer Lindseth Dean of the Johnson School, spoke of the critical role the private sector plays in driving innovation and the promise for realizing the vision of a more sustainable world.
Hart then described two ways to implement clean technology initiatives. The first, which Hart called "Green Giant," are where most of the energy and effort has gone in the United States. Green Giant initiatives are aligned with existing US institutions, are large in scale, and require enormous capital investment. Initiatives in this arena require high volume and an established market to reduce costs. The large investment equates to increased risk of failure, driving the need for government incentives to encourage businesses to play in the space. Solar farms, nuclear energy and clean coal technology all fall into this category.
The alternative is "Little Green" which includes business opportunities that are smaller in scale, labor-intensive, and built from the bottom up. Examples are microturbines, point-of-use water, and decentralized solar. These opportunities begin at the community level and are disruptively innovative, creating new businesses to serve customers in new ways. The bottom-up logic of "little green" is policy independent, and while accelerated by incentives, they are not dependent on them to develop small-scale experiments, creating an opportunity as Hart calls it to "fail small and learn big." Herein lies the opportunity created by the Cornell Global Forum for Sustainable Enterprise.
The intersection of clean technology and Base of the Pyramid business development creates a ripe playground for new business development that can both serve as an opportunity to experiment with "little green" initiatives while creating disruptive businesses that can eventually find their way into developing nations.
As the evening's keynote speaker, H. Fisk Johnson, CEO of S. C. Johnson & Son, discussed the divergent consumption problems facing the world today: the developing nations find consumption is a matter of meeting basic needs while developed nations consume as a matter of convenience, fulfilling social needs, or even to bolster self esteem, commenting, "One society consumes to live, another lives to consume."
Disruptive leadership, according to Johnson, will need to come from businesses, government, and consumers. He adds, "In order to improve human well-being for all in the world, we must get beyond incremental improvements." Businesses must push to take new approaches and find ways to make headway in sustainability while improving the consumer experience or decreasing costs. Consumers, particularly those in developed nations, will need to learn how to trade convenience for a slight increase in cost. This might mean consumers learn to refill cleaner bottles to drive reductions in packaging materials. Johnson also believes that we need disruptive leadership from government, and that government has to provide a greater role in organizing businesses, consumers, and NGOs around a few critical priorities. "Unless the government steps in to create a national agenda around a few priorities, we won't be able to engage consumers to move quickly enough to make a difference."
Over the remaining two days of the Cornell Global Forum delegates will work together to discuss the current state of initiatives in clean technology and Base of the Pyramid business development to accelerate the rate of change towards the Great Convergence. Updates will continue to be posted to twitter, facebook, and the Global Forum blog.
