Collaboration Is the Key to Green Success

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Smart business boils down to leveraging resources in a profitable manner. As awareness grows of the alarming constraints on the planet's finite resources and the imminent need for sustainable business models, executives must stretch existing financial, natural and human capital ever more thinly to stay on track.

Yet an alternative exists right here in our own backyard in the untapped wealth of knowledge, capacity and energy of more than 2,500 accredited institutions of higher education in the United States.

As businesses race to adapt to the changing global landscape, sustainability must become an integrated process, rather than an add-on department or an annual reporting function. The flexible, dynamic organizations that thrive in the new economy will be built upon innovation, empowerment, and knowledge sharing across all departments and job functions.

To streamline this process and ensure a steady pipeline of compatible employees, businesses must reach far back down their supply chain to the universities and graduate business schools that serve as factories where the ideas, skill sets, and technologies of tomorrow are being shaped.

Just as new graduates bring an incredible level of ease with new technology to the workplace, imagine if they entered the business world with the comparable skills and experience required for sustainable business practices. Certainly, there are challenges to effective interaction between business and academia, including patenting and licensing rights, intellectual freedom concerns, and a healthy dose of bureaucracy.

Yet today's ecological and financial realities, coupled with the breadth of untapped opportunity for collaboration, demand a new partnership paradigm. To maintain global competitiveness and adequately prepare tomorrow's knowledge workers, business and academia can no longer exist as separate silos, but must integrate as thriving, complementary networks. Specifically, what benefits does this symbiotic approach offer to the corporate world?

Advantage: Open source R&D

Governed by the Bayh-Dole Act, technology transfer between universities and the corporate world is undergoing a radical transformation in the age of wikinomics and crowdsourcing communities like Innocentive. On the business end, corporate titans IBM, Nokia, Sony and Pitney Bowes joined forces earlier this year to launch the free Eco-Patent Commons initiative. From the academic side, efforts like the Association of University Technology Managers' Better World Project promise to rapidly accelerate R&D partnerships between university research powerhouses and forward-thinking corporations.