Green economy: what will it be about?10 key-words for the coming Green economy

MER – Marketing and Governing Innovative Industrial AreasWorkshop "Green industries and eco-industrial/enterprise zones:

key issues, challenges and opportunities"Valencia 14, 15 and 16 of January 2014

Green economy weak sides

Green economy hasn’t been working properly, due to:

Lack of global governance > Rio +20 turned into Rio -20

Governements keep on postponing those effective and concrete environmental and social policies to tackle Global warming

Yes we could.....well, yes we would.....

Politics failure

Pretending to be sustainable is still mainstream and negative externalities on the environment are still out of corporate accountability

Greenwashing

Is it 100% green?

Products, even the so called ‘green’ ones, require natural resource

Green economy strategies are based on technological approaches and not on civic engagement both top-down and bottom-up

Technology is not the only answer

Planned obsolescence

Enterprises are being still focus on launching into the marketplace short-life products which become useless or out of fashion after a bunch of months

Lack of transparency

When we buy something we don't know if its production process had anyenvironmental and social impact, if it caused greenhouse gases emission, nor

we know the consequences of its disposal

Green technologies imply a smart use of it, a smart use involves an effectiveenvironmental communication and education plan of action

Smartly unsmart

1 fluorescent lamp working 12 hours

=3 incandescent lamps working 4 hours

10 key-words for the coming Green economy

Due to a increasing sense of community and web 2.0 communication empowerment, citizens can collaborate with business to design new products, services and business models

•Patagonia through ebay exhort its customers to buy and/or recycle its second handproducts

•Walmart uses its own customers to deliver online orders

Collaboration

Transparency

By means of corporate accountability but, firstly, a direct and trustful relationship with consumers, companies will be much more pushed to get its

stakeholders known about social and environmental impact of its activities

Distributed

We’ll be ever more self-entrepreneurs (we’ll be producing electric energy we need, renting a room, selling second hand’s, etc.)

Sharing

• Future Economy will be about Access and not ownership

• 52% of USA citizens have rented or borrowed their goods over the past two years (Sunrun2012).64% of britons (ThePeoplewhoshare) and 1 french out of 2 (Observatoire de la Confiance) declaired to take part in the sharing economy.

Reputation

It’s the most important value of a company operating in an aware and informed consumers-shaped market

Reputation is based on trust. Trust is based on transparency

Information

Nowadays citizens can much more easily access to informations about enterprises and thus make a decision/vote about business policy in

terms of ethic and sustainability (boycott or buycott)

Communication

Communication is no longer one-to-many,

it’s a more democratic many-to-many communication

Social innovation

Social Innovation is not only a necessity due to the economic crisis, instead is an increasingly adopted, open and bottom-up way to improve a process meanwhile meeting social needs of all kinds

Participation

Ever more informed and empowered citizens, in terms of capabilities, disappointed by politics, are social players willing to participate, to

express themselves also by means of green consumption

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and

especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers

Know-how and production processes are no longer a business prerogative.

This suggests that not only will business find the solutions we need to overcome the difficult transition period that lies ahead.

These will come from the bottom, from millions of

small entrepreneurs, inventors, hackers, CITIZENS.

Thank you for your attention

Umberto MezzacapoPHDing at

Ces.Co.Com (Study Centre on Consumption and Communication)

Department of Sociology and Economic Laws

Alma Mater Studiorum

University of Bologna