Implications and Options for GIN:
Tasks 6 & 7 from the
General Motors -- Greening of Industry Network Workshop
Envisioning the Future Global Environment
Warren, Michigan, November 13-14, 2000

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In 1998, the Greening of Industry Network (GIN) and General Motors (GM) began a cooperative Envisioning Project to better understand the possible evolution of global environmental issues in the future. The project consisted of two surveys to identify key environmental change forces and an Envisioning Workshop in November 2000. Academic, business, public interest, labor, and government leaders from the Greening of Industry Network met with General Motors met for a two-day workshop on Envisioning the Future Global Environment to gain fresh perspectives around global environmental issues and help understand future business challenges.

During the two-day workshop, GIN and GM participants discussed the potential implications of consumption, technology, and business polices and philosophies in four different scenarios or future worlds. The basic principles of the scenarios were developed by an internal GM team and used with GM's permission for this collaborative effort. A valuable source of research for the workshop were two surveys on critical global issues and forces of environmental change conducted by GM on behalf of the GIN organization in 1997 and 1998. In addition to gaining insights into how major issues may evolve differently in the future, the overall group developed implications and options for GIN to advance a positive global environmental future. Full text of the reports on the surveys and on the workshop are posted in the Publications section of www.greeningofindustry.org.

As the concluding workshop activities, Tasks 6 & 7, we responded to two questions:
Task 6: What might GIN do to address the forces of environmental change?
Task 7: What are GIN's options for moving forward?

Participants wrote down at least three suggestions responding to each of these questions. The group shared their suggestions with one another before a discussion on moving forward ensued. The insights from this exercise are captured below, and posted here to stimulate discussion and debate on the future of GIN.

Task 6: What might GIN do to address the forces of environmental change?
Index
· Web Site and Information Management
· Education
· Research
· Publishing and Publicity
· Growing the Network
· Expand GIN's Influence
· Capacity-building Partnerships
· Conference Structure and Workshops
· Government and Corporations
· Agenda
· Services for GIN Participants

Web Site and Information Management
1. Create a space where anyone can post questions or problems and network members can post suggestions or answers (Bulletin Board for discussion).
2. Create a switchboard to match expertise with needs.
3. Publish and keep current:
· A list of research interests,
· On-going research, and
· Past work of network members
4. Create a section that highlights GIN success stories (especially legislative).
5. Create a section that lists Bibliographies of GIN members. Organize by members' specialization.
6. Allow members to register electronically.
7. Develop a database on expertise and research/practice interests of network members.
8. Post a summary chart of network member fields (academic, agriculture, chemical, environment, finance, government, industry, oil, pharmaceutical, student, telecommunications etc…). Use this information to try to increase membership of underrepresented fields. This will give the network a balance as well as an influx of new ideas.
9. Create an interactive Web site like SimCity that shows the sustainable life cycle consequences of everyday decisions.
10. Create an issue-of-the-month section.
11. Highlight a best practice case every month.
12. Define what sustainability and sustainable development means (give examples).
13. Provide a mechanism to connect researchers with companies and government organizations that want access to new technologies for solving environmental problems.
14. Commercialize GIN.com as an information exchange (have corporate sponsors finance the site).

Education
1. Identify business schools that address environmental and sustainability issues in their curriculum (include a best-of-business-schools list on the Web site).
2. Create environmental and sustainability case studies for business schools.
3. Create a course that weighs the social outcomes of energy design decisions.
4. Develop course material for Second World secondary education that teaches social responsibility in a local context.
5. Develop a modular teaching course on sustainable innovation, design for sustainability, and policies for sustainability.
6. Make the four scenarios and related material available for classroom use.
7. Build and share easy to understand global models that effectively communicate issues at hand.
8. Promote early environmental education at the K-12 level.
9. Create a "tool-kit" of information that can be used (or marketed to) teachers to improve their environmental knowledge (for K-12 students).
10. Create an undergraduate GIN class
11. Set-up an exchange network for Ph.D. students.
12. Use classroom setting to continue to breakdown cultural and nationalistic views that do not favor the environment.
13. Use classroom setting to build consensus on the "right answers" to environmental issues.
14. Businesses need to incorporate "Environmental Literacy" in their job descriptions. This will filter into curriculums by putting the environment on the Dean's agenda.
15. Curriculums should carry the same basic message, which is that the current Western value system is not sustainable.
16. Focus research on profitable pro-environmental enterprises to attract investors.

Research
1. Define what sustainable development means. Give examples.
2. Develop a science of triple button line accounting that weighs social, economic, and environmental costs and values on the same scale.
3. Design a system of sustainable mobility (technical, social, and cultural).
4. Study the interaction between basic well-being and subsistence food practices and appropriate sustainable technology practices that might enhance well-being in their local context.
5. Collect best practices by industry type (place results on GIN's Web site). Identify non-sustainable intermediate social steps and devise alternative paths for social progress.
6. Identify non-sustainable intermediate social steps and devise alternative paths for social progress.

Publishing and Publicity
1. Sponsor joint publications with companies (in addition to academic books).
2. Develop a more active publishing program.
3. GIN should collaborate with Ken Burns on broadcasting a sustainability series on public television.
4. Publish more reports through different media channels (Internet, books, journals, magazines, etc…).
5. Publicize efforts, not only successes, for class room support.
6. In order to grow the network, GIN Members should attend key conferences and seminars wearing a GIN badge.
7. Produce a disaster movie that highlights global warming consequences.
8. Promote "environmentally friendlier" habits at a local level. We must change the value system at the consumer/personal level. Demonstrate environmental value.
9. The world of managed change suggested the need for some new sciences in valuation, etc. GIN could spread the word.

Growing the Network
1. On the GIN Web site, post a summary chart of network members' fields (academic, agriculture, chemical, environment, finance, government, industry, oil, pharmaceutical, student, telecommunications, etc…). Use this information to try to increase membership of under-represented fields. This will give the network a balance as well as an influx of new ideas.
2. Change the name of GIN to Sustainable Industry Network (SIN).
3. Bring together people from different cultural/regional backgrounds to nurture diversity and widen the debate).
4. Have a contact person for non-members.
5. Create a financial basis.

Expand GIN's Influence
1. Create a consulting organization or federation to help businesses, trade associations, governments, or NGOs.
2. Encourage large corporations to promote environmental education.
3. Help create formal and informal institutions to influence business decision-making.
4. There should be a greater emphasis on implementing GIN ideas and knowledge to industry and government.
5. Network on environmental issues: rally the public to conduct environmental pilot programs in their communities.
6. Identify, cultivate, and educate evangelists to promote sustainability in member companies and key industries.
7. Create a volunteer field service to send business people into the third world to create sustainable practices.
8. Develop channels to transfer sustainable technology to developing societies.
9. Encourage members to participate on trade/government committees to represent network views (The U.S. Department of Commerce Committee on Trade and the Environment is looking for an "environmental" member).
10. Encourage businesses to develop appropriate technologies that promote sustainable practices in the developing world.

Capacity-building Partnerships
1. Partner with a widely know organization (e.g., Environmental Defense) and become the impartial science source on issues.
2. Find and collaborate with other NGOs that have similar business-environmental missions, and work together.
3. Develop partnerships with interested organizations.
4. Develop strategic alignments with CERES, GRI, and Business for Social Responsibility.
5. Target some activities on the connections between production and consumption.
6. Identify potential sources of help in the financial sectors.
7. Solicit business to jointly fund research projects for joint benefit.
8. Assemble teams to create and conduct sustainability experiments with business, government, and others.
9. A more sustainable Wall Street: work with public investors to design a criterion that values environmental initiatives for company's market value.
10. Partner with Dow Jones index.
11. Find partners to underwrite participation of non-profits and participants from non-OECD countries.
12. Engage in an experiment of multi-stakeholder innovation (in mobility, shelter, consumption, tourism).

Conference Structure and Workshops
1. Hold more joint meetings with specific industries to discuss solutions.
2. Identify boundary crossing forums where people/key stakeholders in sustainability come together.
3. Hold a workshop on environmental policies and industrial innovations.
4. Conduct envisioning sessions with industry groups (focus on the cascade issues).
5. After Bangkok (2001) and Gothenburg (2002) do not hold any more big conferences, instead have many smaller meetings.
6. Hold annual workshops with different industry sectors.
7. Host a conference for business and government to come together to envision sustainability collaboration.
8. Facilitate meetings and projects around specific supply chains (greening of supply chains).

Government and Corporations
1. Too much focus on centralized governments. GIN should work closer with corporations who can address sustainability issues.
2. Correspond with environmentally enthusiastic people in companies around the world.
3. Promote the exchange of environmental information between developed and under-developed counties.
4. Understand key First World messages that lead to non-sustainable Second World practices, and lobby industry to change.
5. Establish consumer product ratings for compliance with best green practices.
6. Improve LCA to include toxins, not just VOC, energy, water.

Agenda
1. Applied research: explore Trade Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and Ecological Embedded-ness, as sources of ideas and principles for business strategy.
2. Advance an agenda and process for the social aspects of sustainability.
3. Focus on system-wide change.
4. Focus on agenda setting activities.
5. Allow time for more brainstorming to come up with new ideas and visions.
6. Focus on the key problem of climate change for the next five years of meetings.
7. Encourage members to get first-hand knowledge of India, Africa, and Indonesia, for example, by traveling there for at least six months.

Services for GIN Participants
1. Set up internships with GIN professors.
2. Help industry participants identify specific roles for themselves in GIN.

Task 7: Options for moving forward

Summary
The members of the workshop were asked to discuss GIN's options for moving forward. Some of the participants would like GIN to become more active by creating a consulting branch. Others wish for GIN to remain solely a Network. Time did not allow for all of the members concerns to be addressed.

Index
Comments
· Agenda
· Organization
· Active Consultants
· Active Network
· Industry
· General
Questions
· Who should GIN partner with?
· Scenarios
· Future
· Alliance
· General
Action Items

Comments

1. Agenda
· GIN's agenda should focus on ecological efficiency and system level change.
· Ecological efficiency can be worked on at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCD), GEMI, Society for Risk Analysis (SRA), Business Strategy and the Environment (BSE) Conferences, and various cleaner production roundtables.

2. Organization
· Maybe GIN can become a hybrid organization with a more structured core.
· GIN has already worked on sustainability and how it relates to highly regulated industries.
GIN could broker big opportunities with the 5/6ths of the world that is not working on sustainability. Enormous gains can be made with awareness and training.
· GIN should look for "partners" in other environmental circles.
· Provide assistance through experience and teaching.
· Provide credibility in academics through standards of excellence.

3. Active Consultants
· GIN may want to consider having a consulting branch similar to what the WBCD has. This could be used to gain grants, partnerships, and financial capital. To begin this branch GIN could follow a venture capital model and explain what differentiates them from other environmental and sustainability groups.
· GIN as knowledge broker
· GIN as assessment committee consultant
· GIN as small business consultant
· There is no structure or interface to allow for this.
· Most of the suggestions posted here deal with passive information exchange or small
conferences. Maybe it is time for a pilot effort to try an active mode.
· GIN should want to be facilitators of change.

4. Active Network
· GIN has the platform for people to get connected with environmental consultants.
· GIN gives "space" for learning (platform to drive change)
· 80 prcent of GIN members are agents of change. They use GIN to implement change within their own organizations. Therefore, GIN helps people leverage their own efforts.

5. Industry
· Large and medium businesses have more capital to become green and sustainable than
do smaller companies.
· Individual companies can take the lead on sustainable solutions for an industry issue (sustainability is an industry issue).
· GIN's best chance in making a difference is to work with larger firms who appreciate long-term research.

6. General
· GIN has traditionally acted as a loose coalition with little organization.
· Many organizations, including the UN, think with boundaries in mind. There is no forum for global system level thinking to create societal change.
· GIN should look at where it can add value at a reasonable cost. That is, how can it make a difference effectively?
· GIN has allowed Americans and Europeans to hear each other's perspectives on the environment and sustainability. This needs to be further branched out. Southeast Asia is a good start.
· It GIN wants to go to action, maybe it needs to take a different approach - target W2/W3 opinions.

Questions
1. Who should GIN partner with?
· What kind of organizations within industry?
· What kind of partnerships do we need?
· How should partners conduct workshops and proceed with moving GIN's initiatives forward?
· Should GIN be worried about competition from competing entities? GIN needs to remain sensitive to competitors exchanging ideas. (Today GIN collaborates and cooperates with networks on the same mission.)

2. Scenarios
· How does GIN envision society moving forward?
· How should GIN promote preferred routes and block non-preferred routes?

3. Future
· Will adding structure to GIN undermine our objectives?
· If GIN disappeared what gaps would exist? Would people miss it? Why would they miss it?
· Should GIN use outside consultants to rate GIN's effectiveness?
· GIN needs more representation from China and India. Which areas of the world do we want to concentrate on? Is our organizational structure suitable for that part of the world?
· To what extent does GIN work to help companies become environmentally conscious?

4. Alliance
· Why not couple with WBCSD in a strategic alliance?
· Start a joint project with WBCSD?
· Environmental viewpoints.
· Sustainability viewpoints.
· Diverse input.

5. General
· What organizations lack environmental initiatives?
· What are GIN's measures of success?
· When they have collaboration?
· When communication is distributed?
· When people come back to GIN conferences?

Action Items:
· GIN should compile a list of significant organizations that do not have environmental initiatives and try to help them.
· Institutional issues need to be discussed by academics and business leaders.
· It is valuable to have cross-functional people contributing to GIN's work. We've been operating with an open platform for over a decade. It's now time to evaluate how to continue. Discover how people learn and how that learning translates into action.
· GIN should leverage the legitimacy of this group by sponsoring other organizations with similar messages.

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