There are more than 55,000 environmental nonprofit organizations registered in the U.S. today, and many more green businesses, all competing for the support of responsible consumers. At a recent event in San Francisco, a trio of green business owners suggested that this type of traditional competition may not be the most effective way to make large-scale change. They instead proposed a new model: radical collaboration.
The phrase ‘radical collaboration’ has been used to describe a variety of phenomena, from participation in Wikipedia and similar ventures to cross-disciplinary cooperation in academics. In business, it means creating alliances between a group of former competitors to solve problems together. The concept has been used by corporations: for example, when IBM was losing money on semiconductor chips in 2003, it made the decision to open its research to a network of competitors, and began a new, successful method of innovation that has now been expanded to other departments. Now some argue that the same type of innovation should be applied to the sustainability movement.
Two of the presenters in San Francisco, GenGreen and 3rdWhale are in the business of mobile green business directories. "They were our biggest competitor," 3rdWhale CEO Boyd Cohen says of GenGreen. 3rdWhale was an expert in mobile technology, while GenGreen had a large, successful database -- and both were scrambling to build iPhone apps and more. Ultimately, after meeting at a LOHAS conference earlier this year, the two rivals decided to work together and leverage their complementary strengths. They have also since partnered with Creative Citizen, an online community listing solutions for sustainable living. The three partners were so pleased with the results, they are now recommending similar collaborations for other business owners.
"Every single one of us has been working as hard as we can," says Creative Citizen CEO Scott Badenoch of the green movement. But he points out that the problem is more urgent than ever, and argues that the movement needs to work smarter, rather than harder. For him, the answer is radical collaboration and something he calls "sharesourcing"-- sharing the core competencies of one business with another, so that each ends up with more resources.
There are many more examples of radical collaboration as a trend. In May, we wrote about a collaborative project called Green Xchange, which allows companies like Nike and Best Buy to share sustainability research to speed innovation. Another innovative business, The Hub promotes collaboration by offering a space for people working on the world's challenges to come together and share ideas, resources, experience, and connections. The Hub has about twenty locations around the world, including a new U.S. space in Berkeley's Brower Center.
Sustainable development expert Hunter Lovins lists Walmart's new sustainability policies -- and the effect they'll have across manufacturing, as another example of radical collaboration. She argues that collaboration is necessary.
"If we don't act, and act immediately," Lovins says, "we will lose the opportunity to avoid runaway climate change. Whatever individual successes we might have... we are not getting the job done. If you look at historic transitions, they take too long, given the amount of time we have."
In traditional economic theory, competition is an important driver of innovation. But it can also cause duplication of efforts -- 3rdWhale was spending serious resources trying to re-create GenGreen's database, for example, before they decided to partner. And it's possible that reinventing the wheel will take more time than we have.
Adele Peters holds a Master's in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability from Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden.
Image credit: thegoldguys.blogspot.com/ Creative Commons license
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Worldchanging: Bright Green: Radical Collaboration
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