1. Green economy: what will it be about?
10 key-words for the coming Green economy
MER – Marketing and Governing Innovative Industrial Areas
Workshop "Green industries and eco-industrial/enterprise zones:
key issues, challenges and opportunities"
Valencia 14, 15 and 16 of January 2014

2. Green economy weak sides
Green economy hasn’t been working properly, due to:
Lack of global governance > Rio +20 turned into Rio -20

3. Politics failure
Governements keep on postponing those effective and concrete
environmental and social policies to tackle Global warming
Yes we could.....well, yes we would.....

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

5. Is it 100% green?
Products, even the so called ‘green’ ones, require natural resource

6. Technology is not the only answer
Green economy strategies are based on technological approaches and
not on civic engagement both top-down and bottom-up

7. 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

8. Lack of transparency
When we buy something we don't know if its production process had any
environmental and social impact, if it caused greenhouse gases emission, nor
we know the consequences of its disposal

9. Smartly unsmart
Green technologies imply a smart use of it, a smart use involves an effective
environmental communication and education plan of action
1 fluorescent lamp working 12 hours
=
3 incandescent lamps working 4 hours

10. 10 key-words for the coming Green economy
Collaboration
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 hand
products
•Walmart uses its own customers to deliver online orders

11. 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

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

13. 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.

14. 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

15. 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)

16. Communication
Communication is no longer one-to-many,
it’s a more democratic many-to-many communication

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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.

21. Thank you for your attention
Umberto Mezzacapo
PHDing at
Ces.Co.Com (Study Centre on Consumption and Communication)
Department of Sociology and Economic Laws
Alma Mater Studiorum
University of Bologna