Mary Tripsas, an associate professor in the entrepreneurial management unit at the Harvard Business School, recently wrote an article featured in The New York Times titled Everybody in the Pool of Green Innovation. The piece is about large companies working together on green innovations. It sounds like a great idea, and a way for companies to work together on common goals, when patents are taken on idea’s that aren’t particularly profitable, but help conserve energy or reduce pollution. The big names involved in the Eco-Patent Commons are Bosch, Dow, DuPont, Fuji-Xerox, IBM, Nokia, Pitney Bowes, Ricoh, Sony, Taisei and Xerox.
Creative Commons’s Green Xchange is another group, whose goal is to add transparency to the sustainability to the supply chain. This is being supported by Best Buy and Nike.
This idea works great for large companies, however, there still appears to be a need to focus students on designing for a sustainable future. Innovate For Tomorrow is my proposed solution, however, without financing I’m having a bit of trouble getting it off the ground (the php development to enable the core features is the main issue).