Thanks for the comments. I agree with you. Professional associations offer untapped potential for stimulating green innovation, particularly within the small and medium size business sector. That said, professional associations — with some exceptions — have been slow to respond to either the challenges or opportunities that social networking presents to their business model. I would certainly like to learn more about any hotspots of innovation you may have identified to date.

Two comments. First, It would be great if this site treated climate change as a subsystem of environment which is a system within Sustainability.

Second, It seems that the power of professional associations with their inherent volunteerism and access into enterprises and stakeholders is an untapped social network for driving enterprise and sector change.

For example, combining the insights I’ve gained as chair of Corenet Global’s Sustainability Community, partner at Business EcoSystems, and engagement with NGOs has identified an opportunity to create a more sustainable Commercial Real Estate sector.

Why is this significant? To date, several NGOs have made unsuccessful attempts at increasing sustainability. They’ve used a traditional model of working with large, leading companies not realizing that the highly segmented and fragmented nature of the Commercial Real Estate industry would significantly inhibit efficacy.

I’ve proposed and started a multi-lateral consortium in September 2009 as an experimental response to the industry’s intransigence. The core premise of this approach is to leverage the inherent volunteerism of professional associations, NGOs and public sector associations that are involved in or associated with the commercial and corporate real estate processes.

It’s too early to assess the impact of this model as the consortium is still in the membership phase of its formation. That being said, the Consortium members have created its first multilateral technical working group (TWG) to address sustainable transactions starting with leases and leasing strategies. This group includes the American Bar Association, Corenet Global, NRDC, EDF, and Clinton Climate Initiative. This TWG is still building its membership.

Core premise number 2, the Consortium is to operate using sustainable processes. This means aggregating and harmonizing existing work product and current research creating new work product only to fill gaps left by the existing content. This will take the place of program-product-standard neutral guidelines, guidance, and tools

Core premise number 3, all Consortium work product will be open source and freely accessible (at no cost) through knowledge centers. These knowledge centers will be sponsored by member associations. For example, the American Bar Association would act as the knowledge center for transactions maintaining and updating work product, FAQs, and Forums.

Core premise number 4,Consortium membership is free. It is unfortunate that many well meaning NGOs require membership fees to their organizations or for their initiatives. This creates a sense of elitism. Examples that come to mind are the SBAlliance, UNEP, Global Reporting Initiative.

Ultimately, I believe there needs to be a paradigm shift in engagement models that integrate the best practices of previous models such as Linux, Greenhouse Gas Protocol, GRI’s G3 development and social networking trends and not just the tools enabling social networks.

Regards,

George