Program

New Economic Paradigms

Sustainable Resources is all about finding the common ground that diverse organizations, individuals and groups share. We look for complementary interests that can unite various resource sets and create more powerful and successful partnerships and projects. Organizations and individuals all have an assortment of strengths and weaknesses. When they try to do everything on their own, they do well where they have strengths, fail or become less successful where they have weaknesses. In order to achieve significant progress toward accomplishing the UN's Millennium Goals, we need to let go of some our organizational chauvinism and and become more effective by creating more potent and collaborative team efforts.

The business world offers tremendous potential for implementing this strategy.

Small “versus” Large Business

The traditional business model demonstrates this potential. Though on the surface very competitive, small and large business complement each other and together create a successful result for all. Small businesses are like kayaks, large ones like an ocean liners. Small business can quickly maneuver, change tactics, experiment and test new products as well as ways of doing business. They can sift through promising ideas and products, find the successful ones and test them in the real world. By nature, entrepreneurs   are experimental, creative and audacious. When a new idea or product passes the entrepreneurial test, it's ready for the ocean liner of big business to carry it forward into a big influence on the world.

Non-profit “versus” Corporate

While traditionally non-profits may look down on corporate culture and the big business world may at best give token acknowledgement to the non-profit world, there's tremendous potential for a sharing of assets and resources that can greatly benefit both approaches. By bringing more of a business approach into the non-profit and development world, projects can become more sustainable, organizations more self-sufficient, and people's confidence can increase. By business aligning more strongly with non-profits, they can enrich the meaningfulness, value and inspiration – for their employees, shareholders and customers. And this translates into more productivity, more financial support, and higher sales.

Developing and the Developed World

The possibilities for these kinds of collaborative business synergies may be strongest between interests in the “developing” and “over-developed” worlds. In order to stay profitable, business needs to continually find new customers, increase sales and profitability. Rather than doing this by having to convince over-consuming people in the developed world that they always need the next new product or service to be happy, they could cultivate the 5 billion people who really do need better material goods and services. And by applying good business principles, the developing world can make solid economic progress without the uncertainty and sometimes confidence eroding effects of just relying on aid and charity.

SR2004 Program

We received 79 proposals for presentations in this track and only had time slots for 18. Because there were so many excellent suggestions, we decided to split NEP into two main themes and add 18 more presentations. The first theme is related to developing world issues like microfinance, microenterprise, grant writing and fundraising, open source and alternative currencies. The second theme set includes topics more relevant for the developed world: socially responsible investing, eco-preneurship, natural capitalism, product design, leadership skills, corporate social responsibility, and new monetary innovations. For the complete proposal list, see NEP sessions