Collaborating Effectively to Advance Sustainability - SJThis is a featured page

Why are you here, and what does "Collaborating Effectively to Advance Sustainability" mean to you?
  • Connective tissue of communications
  • Integration across the difference sectors in sustainability (public/legislative, private companies)
  • Monetization as a tool to help promote value
  • Micro-view inside a large company - how do we collaborate effectively between silos?
  • Incentives/motivations for corporations to share information (ultimate goal: to accelerate change in marketplace)
  • Outsourcing of sustainability for small organizations
  • How do we create a sustainable business network? How to use technology to enable interconnections and information sharing, iterate on platforms and models that already exist- Enable, Capture, and Propagate
  • How do we combat climate change through collaboration?
  • How do we scale change management tools used organizations to the industry?
  • Integrate sustainability into the culture of an organization
Some Barriers to Collaboration:
  • Sharing Proprietary Information
    • Chemical Industry
    • Building Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs)
  • Lack of an informed party within collaboration (effort/network can make no progress or wrong progress because they don't have access to expert advice on best practices, etc.)
  • willingness to participate
    • worried about competitive edge
  • worried about NGO responses to efforts (not enough, not good enough, not soon enough, what about this, etc.)


Some Models/Examples of Change and Collaboration:
  • Model for change inside companies/organizations
  • Ideo - looked at how nature collaborates - generated some best practices from that
  • Model from retail - EPDs
  • Use model from tech? Companies are collaborating on sustainability despite the competition - tech industry is familiar with co-opetition because they have done it (e.g. open source)
    • how did open source model start? Impetus around open source because developer community wanted to rally against "evil empire" - network effect allowed for mass-production http://tim.oreilly.com/opensource/index.csp
    • the importance of network effect to collaboration
Best Practices to Enable Collaboration/Networking:
  • Sustainability enables collaboration between organizations (e.g. sustainability leaders collaborate more frequently already - Sustainable Silicon Valley)
  • Establish a clear goal around sustainability (e.g. carbon reduction)
  • There must be external pressure or a compelling event - EICC was collaboration partially in reaction to the supply chain code of conduct in apparel (Nike in the 90s) - EICC was general enough in code of conduct that has been able to be adopted by others
  • Standardize within an industry - enable organizations to define towards sustainability change
    • (e.g. Wal-mart supplier score card/index, AB32 defines carbon neutrality)
    • ISO 4000 - Sustainability Quotient
    • energy efficient product may have really toxic components - is that really sustainable
  • Ensure there is an informed party inside the collaboration sphere/coalition generating action - overcome the lack of knowledge - that person should be paid/full-time
  • Inside an organization/company - ensure there is a decision-maker (i.e. director-level) that is accountable for sustainabiliy
  • Need strong leadership who can help drive the agenda of the network
  • Overcome the barrier of criticism for participation - companies that are open or transparent about their environmental profile can be targeted for negative feedback (e.g. Wal-Mart collaborate with NGO collaboration)
  • Go to crowdsourcing model for best practices in sustainability - will need a platform to share information freely
    • for more than just duality but the matrix level
  • Build quality assurance into the model - a network for collaboration is only as good as the quality- need agreed upon standards or a "code of conduct"
  • Participants in network need to receive value for participation (create "the hook", value proposition)
    • A collaboration network is only as good as the number of participants
    • Need to establish and communicate the value
    • need to show results - demonstrating good practices
    • e.g. if there's a pay-to-participate model (ILBI), sometimes have to pre-populate with useful and substantive data (perhaps voluntary/good actors), Living Building Challenge have collaborative mechanisms to share research/mindmaps/best practices
    • The "hook" is not always directly financial - but it usually has to do with the goals of the organization (efficiency of effort, public image, etc.) and/or external pressures (compelling event, incentives, customer inquiries/pressure, a la Wal Mart or other customer pressures, funder inquiries/demands, etc.) - Collaboration can also be in response to a strongly held value (Open Source combating the "Evil Empire" and desiring the freedom to do what they wanted with the web) - peer pressure/peer respect -

  • Overcome proprietary information barriers using neutral third-party for verification

Resources:





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