Posts in 'Events & Activities'

Our inaugural EDFix module has focused on the Commons, with calls about governing the Commons, sharing green patents, bottom-up problem solving of global problems, life cycle cost analysis and most recently a dive into sharing data among health care institutions. Our guests have been stellar.

Shortly we'll shift to a module about the green opportunities in vehicle fleets, but before we do, let's see what insights about our interactions with the Commons we might apply to organizational strategy.

Our guest for this next call, Silke Helfrich, brings deep insights about the Commons from a German perspective. She first got our attention with this Commons Manifesto and a simpler post on Shareable.net. We'll focus this call on Silke's article "The commons as a common paradigm for social movements and beyond" and discuss why and how the concept of the Commons might matter to sustainable business.

Please join us on Monday, March 22, 2010 at noon ET (9am PT) for the call:

• Phone number: +1 (213) 289-0500
• Code: 267-6815

Get Updates about EDFix Conference Calls

If you'd like to get announcements about upcoming EDFix conference calls and the results with podcast releases, please sign-up here:

An important objective of Environmental Defense Fund's Innovation Exchange is to connect with other people who work at the nexus of business and sustainability and make the whole network more effective. We believe networking and shared learning are central to the rapid innovation needed to dramatically improve sustainability in business. We want to know who you are, what you are doing and to give you the opportunity to know what we are doing and learning.

Therefore, we are maintaining a number of networking channels to help us find each other as well as communications channels to help us inform each other. We hope you'll join in by connecting with us, following what we're doing and sharing back your activities, products and lessons. Here are some ways:

Let's meet face-to-face. We're helping organize a series of 1-day events in cities around the country.  These "Green Innovation in Business Solutions Labs" are "open space" events with lots of opportunity to network and share experience. We will be in 10 cities in 2010. In addition to Durham, NC (where we were in January), we'll have events in Washington DC, New York, Fayetteville, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, San Jose, Boston, and Austin. To get announcements about Solutions Labs activity, add your email address to the list.  You'll get a few emails each month letting you know what's coming up next as well as reports from the Solutions Labs after they happen.

If you can't make one of the Solutions Labs, you can look for us at another event in which we are participating. We keep a calendar of "events of interest" and mark the ones where you can find EDF staff. You can find out what we look like and are interested in on these individual Corporate Partnerships team bio pages.

Talk to us via phone. We host EDFix Conference Calls twice a month which featuring doers and thinkers of note. You can join us for these calls every 2nd and 4th Monday at 9 AM PT (noon ET). To receive announcements about upcoming calls and find out what happened in calls you missed, add your email address to this list.  We send emails to announce the topics a few days before each call, as well as "afterthoughts" a few days after each call.

Staying in-touch on-line.

• The best way to learn about what we are doing is to follow postings to the Innovation Exchange blog. Almost all our activities and new materials end up on the blog in some  form. You can follow via RSS feed or email [1 email every weekday or two].
• We have organized lessons learned, tools and other guidance developed from our 20 years of experience working with business on our Innovation Exchange website.
• We also use Twitter daily. You can follow us @EDFix and tag your tweets with #EDFix to be sure we see them.
• We maintain a set of "bookmarks" of what we are reading on Del.icio.us – you can visit Delicious or subscribe to our feed using Google Reader to see green business, innovation and other stories that we think are interesting.

Following one of our projects. Perhaps you don't want to know about everything we are doing, but would like to hear news about a specific project.  You can sign-up for project-specific email announcements for these projects [each tends to generate less than one email per week]:

• Private equity / Green Returns – work with KKR and other private equity firms
• Fleet vehicles – work with car and truck fleets
• Climate Corps – MBA students work with companies on energy efficiency
• Walmart Partnership – on-going, multi-faceted work with Walmart

(Note: if you are already signed up for all the blog announcements, you don't need to sign up for the projects too.)

Tracking EDFix Strategy. If you are really interested in the objectives and approach of EDF's Innovation Exchange – details about what we are thinking, planning to do, and why – please participate in the EDF Innovation Exchange Community Google Group, which contains strategy and planning documents we're using as we set up and assess our work. Sign-up with the group to participate. [There is a low level of email activity.]

Contact me. If all else fails, contact me — 202 572 3250 via phone, dwitzel@edf.org via email, @dwitzel (or @EDFix) on twitter or on Linkedin.

I'm looking forward to being in touch.



Anthony Williams, co-author of Wikinomics and its forthcoming sequel, Macrowikinomics, joined the EDFix call on Feb. 22 to give us his insights into new approaches for large-scale change we will increasingly see for addressing global issues.

His thesis is that problems like climate change won't be solved by global initiatives like COP15 alone. We also need myriad small, distributed experiments and social innovations. These will help change percolate to every corner of the planet through willing participants, rather than relying on mandates or regulations from above.

As Wikinomics describes, we're seeing creative new approaches to collaboration in efforts like open source software projects and Wikipedia. It was encouraging to hear Anthony describe how these approaches are being demonstrated in small projects (like Carbon Rally and CARMA) as well as adopted in large enterprises like IBM.

Anthony's recent work helps to explain broader principles that enable these change strategies. He emphasized transparency, openness, and collaboration but also the concept of integrity and the need for inter-generational thinking. Mobile phones are very quickly connecting communities that are so poor that it seemed they would remain unheard forever. Business, governments and society are finding new symbiotic relationships.

The next EDFix call, on Monday March 8, will build on these themes to explore how principles learned from development of Open Source Software can be applied in other business settings.  We'll be joined by Brian Behlendorf, who was  part of the community that developed and managed the hugely successful Apache web server and is now applying what he learned to his work on health IT working with the Department of Health and Human Services.  Please join us!

• Phone number: +1 (213) 289-0500
• Code: 267-6815

Get Updates about EDFix Conference Calls

If you'd like to get announcements about upcoming EDFix conference calls and the results with podcast releases, please sign-up here:

Many organizations now rely on open source software, ranging from the famed Linux operating system to its web-server cousin Apache, right down to curiously named programs like jboss, tomcat, Moodle, Drupal, mailman, SugarCRM, Zimbra, Asterisk and smarty.

But how many have adopted open source processes? The programmer communities that designed those applications (and the Internet they mostly ride) developed principles and practices that are broadly useful. These include keeping the code and the conversations completely open to outsiders, governance and licensing models, and platform and interoperability strategies.

We have an opportunity to take a quick, deep dive into a particular situation where these dynamics are at work. Read more »

On March 3^rd, Gwen Ruta will be a “working-group facilitator” at The Wall Street Journal’s ECO:nomics Conference in Santa Barbara, CA.

From March 9^th thru March 12^th Jana Holt and Jason Mathers will be at the National Truck Equipment Association’s Work Truck Show in St. Louis, MO. In Conjunction with the Work Truck Show, Jana will be speaking at The Green Truck Summit on Incentives on March 9^th. At the event, EDF will be showcasing a new white-paper on greenhouse management for medium duty trucks, based on our Green Fleet program.

Business author Bruce Piasecki will be speaking at the National Press Club’s Holeman Lounge on March 10^th about his book "The Surprising Solution," and Dave Witzel will attend the event to learn more about "Succeeding in a Carbon and Capital Constrained World."

Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp and Director of Marketing Communications for Corporate Partnerships, Melanie Janin will be in New York City on March 15^th for the Economist’s Corporate Citizenship Conference where former President Bill Clinton will give the keynote address. Read more »

As many of you know, we have been working with Walmart for the past several years to measurably reduce its environmental impact in the areas of global warming, packaging, plastic bag waste, agriculture, toxic materials while leveraging the power of its supply chain here and in China. Read more »

Last month, I attended my first Solutions Lab in Durham, North Carolina. For those that don't know, Environmental Defense Fund is hosting Solutions Labs around the country to bring together sustainability thought leaders from all walks of life. To be honest, I was a little skeptical that the "unconference"-style event (one where attendees choose the topics of discussion) would be a good use of my time. Fortunately, my concerns were unwarranted. Not only was this one of the best conferences I've attended in a long time, but it also tackled an issue that the sustainable business community has generally shied away from – CONSUMPTION. Read more »

Kirk Hourdajian

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Duke Conference on Sustainable Business and Social Impact, at Duke University’s Fuqua Business School.  Keynote speakers included Chad Holliday, former CEO and current Board Chairman of DuPont; Jonathan Greenblatt, founder of Ethos Water and Dina Powell, Global Head of Corporate Engagement at Goldman Sachs.

My panel, "Cleantech, make it, fund it," was part of the Finance breakout track.  My co-panelists and I represented an interesting cross-section of the private equity/venture capital industry: Read more »

Sustainability movements worldwide have created major new institutions and exchanges, from high-level conferences and carbon taxes to national markets and associated currencies.

Anthony Williams, co-author of Wikinomics and its forthcoming sequel, Macrowikinomics, has a hunch these efforts are the wrong way to go about precipitating the broad, deep changes we need if we really are going to change how we all get around, get power, eat, shop, learn, share and make things. We need to rely less on centralized control and more on self-organizing efforts everywhere initiating small experiments and piloting social innovations. Some of these will mushroom into pervasive changes in societal behavior. Read more »

John Wilbanks from Science Commons and Kelly Lauber, Director of Nike's Sustainable Business & Innovation Lab,  joined us on the February 8th EDFix call to discuss the GreenXchange project, which was announced at the World Economic Forum in January.

Highlights from the call included: Read more »