Summary and conclusions of a series of interviews conducted with stakeholders about openly sharing sustainability knowledge and innovations (i.e. open-source).

Summary:

• Commons-style sharing—such as open source—is seen as having benefits such as spurring innovation and improving access and choice to technology

• We hypothesized that commons-style sharing of sustainability innovation and knowledge could help accelerate sustainability progress and reduce duplicative efforts (save money, time); so we conducted interviews to better understand the challenges and opportunities

• Sustainability professionals shared with us that sharing has changed over time as sustainability has become more central to business strategy and as more third-parties have demanded sustainability progress

• However, as sustainability has become more important to companies (and subsequently seen as a competitive advantage), the perceived risks of sharing have increased, leading to a shutting down of truly open sharing

• There are some more private forums (such as those under Chatham House rules) in which more sharing happens, but this information isn’t made widely known; and often is more of the “what” than the “how”

• As the pressure for us to collectively become more sustainable will only increase, we encourage companies to continue to make efforts to share openly and publicly about sustainability knowledge and innovation—not just their accomplishments after the fact

• It is our hope that this preliminary research will catalyze more research, sharing methodologies and interest in developing truly collaborative platforms for expediting sustainable solutions for all.

Conducted with John Rooks from The SOAP Group.