Public awareness and heightened interest in environmental sustainability issues, driven by growing consensus that climate change has occurred, has brought sustainability to the fore as a key business issue - both as an opportunity and as a risk. An example of the business opportunity seen in sustainability is demonstrated by GE’s commitment to grow US $20 billion revue from what GE refers to as “eco-business”, which is supported by its “ecomagination” campaign. “Ecomagination” puts into practice GE’s belief that, “financial and environmental performance can work together to drive company growth”. GE is ranked as the world’s second largest company by market capitalization.
Parallel to GE’s ecomagination commitment, Clean Tech venture capital funding, which comprises of alternative energy, pollution and recycling, power supplies and conservation, saw record levels of investment with US $844 million going into sixty-two deals in the third quarter of 2007. This represented an 80 percent increase in the dollar level and 35 percent increase in the number of deals in the Clean Tech sector in the second quarter of 2007.
At the same time as the business community is making investments and placing bets in the perceived opportunities of sustainability the Internet has continued to bring network connectivity to the global community. Internet penetration is approximately 19% of the global population, which equates to approximately 1.2 billion users as of September 30, 2007. The growth rate of Internet penetration is estimated at 245% for the period 2000 – 2007. This growth in network connectivity suggests that, “For the first time in history, you have a global market of 1 billion-plus people, all connected over an interactive network. The opportunities are bigger than ever before.” (Marc Andreessen, New York Times, October 28, 2007). This connectivity enables a phenomenon termed Collective Intelligence. While there are many suggestions for definition of Collective Intelligence, a generally accepted definition of Collective Intelligence is, “the capacity of a human community to evolve toward higher order complexity thought, problem-solving and integration through collaboration and innovation" (http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Collective_Intelligence, 2007). On the Internet these Collective Intelligence technologies manifest themselves as search engines, social community based websites, blogs, viral email campaigns, SMS text messaging, instant messaging and wikis.
As consumer sustainability and Collective Intelligence gather momentum, so do the services that orbit around these activities. The response to the needs of business will be identifiable by marketers’ communications promoting the new sustainable consumption paradigm. The marketers’ strategies will adapt to the sustainable consumption model and in turn will create their own momentum in their dialogue with consumers as marketers’ transition to promoting sustainable consumption product life-cycles. There now exists the possibility to leverage Collective Intelligence technologies to help create and promote the marketing of sustainable consumer products.
to be continued ...
Thursday, November 8, 2007
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