The Glocal Citizen

new concept: sustainopreneurship March 24, 2009

People who fail to see that our world has fundamentally changed are wrong. This is not the contraction phase of a balanced cycle that will start all over again. This is a key moment, a turning point in the history of our civilization, a time to contemplate long-term consequences of our decisions.

It is time to radically modify some of our concepts to adapt them to our new reality, the same way our ancestors had to admit the Earth was not flat and was not the center of the universe. This is what a group of people are trying to do under the name of AEREAS with a campaign to spread the concept of sustainopreneurship as the new way we should be doing business.

Poverty. Climate Change. Epidemics.  Problems are there and have been there for a long time. A lot has been written about them. Non-profit projects (based on unstable fundraising) and government actions (with limited capability) have not been sufficient to provide significant long-term solutions to the problems. We need to add business to the equation, we need creativity and innovation.

The first step was social entrepreneurship, (I even studied cases from Schwab and Ashoka in business school), but it still didn’t offer a fundamental change. It was merely a hybrid, a “not-only-for-profit”, which is a good step forward but not enough to get where we need.

How do we involve in one single concept all the innovation agents (academia, industry, government), and sustainability both as purpose and part of the process?

I believe Anders Abrahamsson (@sliceonline) is right on target with the concept of sustainopreneurship:

- “View the sustainability agenda as something that creates even greater business opportunities than the problems”

- “Solution and business emerges from the local context, bottom-up, not top-down. Acting local, thinking global!”

I invite everybody to join the conceptual campaign to get 1 million hits in Google for this word before the year 2009 ends.

Hopefully this concept will go beyond the word into our minds and then into real business decisions and actions.