Government - Written Thursday, October 29, 2009 by Steve Guengerich - 3 Comments

Hopenhagen: Climate change 2.0

Earlier this month, I posted some thoughts related to cleantech and sustainability innovation, with respect to the impact that changes in the field of intellectual property may have on accelerating discoveries and products.

I specifically talked about the nascent, but very exciting work underway with the GreenXchange, being championed by Nike, Creative Commons, and Best Buy, along with other founding members (of which nGenera is one, in the interest of full disclosure).

Well, the post spurred interest from several sources, one of which was my good friend Scott Campbell at SAP. Scott introduced me to the “Hopenhagen” movement, which is being led by partners Coca-Cola, Siemens, and SAP. The goal of Hopenhagen is to prompt an effective dialog among citizens of all the world’s nations to raise awareness for the importance of decisions at COP 15 that support a healthy climate and a healthy global economy.

COP 15 is the United Nations event occurring in mid-December in Copenhagen, Denmark where world leaders are expected to, in my layman’s terms, pick up where Kyoto left off and produce an agreement to which ALL of the world’s nations can agree to protect the earth’s climate. You can learn more about the mission of Hopenhagen at the movement’s website.

In Scott’s words, “Individual empowerment and commitment are critical to the success of this effort and Hopenhagen serves as a natural extension to give everyone an opportunity to raise their voice for change.” Apart from the Hopenhagen website, you can learn more about the specific point of view of SAP customers and other members of their eco-system in the Sustainability area on BPX, SAP’s corporate blog, which Scott claims reaches 1.8 million member communities.

POSTSCRIPT: Not to digress too much from the topic of corporate efforts to stem climate change, but there is an incredibly important sub-text to these two efforts (i.e., Hopenhagen and GreenXchange) that is relevant to every other private or public sector initiative where using collaborative software and other tools of the web 2.0/social media age are critical to success.

Historically, the standard practices employed to ensure that such an effort doesn’t wither include practices like securing strong executive sponsorship, executing strategically targeted word-of-mouth promotions, and assigning a focused online community manager or two.

However, time and again, anecdotal evidence has begun to show that such collaborative efforts have a “high mortality rate.” Why is this so, even when one has budgeted appropriately and run their collaborative community “by the book?”

The answer lies in a previously poorly understood phenomenon we call “Collaborative Intents,” that Tammy Erickson and other senior members of nGenera’s faculty and research team have studied. I’ll talk more about Collaborative Intents in my next Wikinomics post in November. In the meantime, if you want to get a jump start on the topic, you can download the Boardroom Imperative authored by Tammy and others now.