A complete break down in our economic system extends a powerful opportunity to responsibly reshape a new economic era. An era where our markets work in concert not with consumer demand, but within the footprint of our demands. Consumerism doesn’t drive our economic health, but the regenerative nature of our resources do. We call this next generation market transformation. This is a culture-wide shift that distills consumer demands to a level that ensures environmental equity over the fiscal bottom line; a shift that creates lasting behavioral change across an entire economic and business landscape.
Historically, ‘market transformation’ is a strategy defined and leveraged specifically by utilities and energy efficiency groups to promote the manufacture and purchase of energy-efficient products and services. The horizon is long-term - with investment yielding profound structural and behavioral marketplace energy practices. Unless you’re working within or around the utility sector, the advantages of money savings, environmental benefits and economic productivity become lost on the general practitioner - until now. Because now, we can work to build a business case for market transformation that applies to the entire scope of a new, sustainable economy - across all sectors: energy, waste, transportation, building & materials.
But let’s take a step back. Market transformation is not a new concept. - It is a predictable trend ignited when technology progress becomes a catalyst for economic shifts. One of the most pivotal examples to transform markets was the arrival of electricity. From manufacturing floor to home, suddenly vast amounts of time became available. With the availability of electric light, manufacturing and production expanded operating time. At home, new electric-powered inventions replaced time consuming chores. Freed from demanding household work, many women entered the labor market - creating vast amounts of disposable income, product demand, and lasting behavior change that transformed policy, politics, education, industry, and roles within the home.
Fast forward to the 1980’s, when computer technology uncovered the possibility of the home computer. After several false starts the PC found a rapid adoption rate and within five years, from 1980 - 1985, five million homes owned a PC. What happened next transformed entire industries, catalyzed new markets, created new business models and spawned new products. People created new rules for social interaction, communication and even language. A massive and deep cultural shift created lasting behavior change and deeply transformed a global market place all within the span of about 25 years.
Here we are again, on the precipice of another market transformation opportunity - borne of necessity and innovation: The Need? Reduce a risky dependence on fossil fuels. The Innovation? Assign a true cost of carbon, thus catalyzing research, investment and commercialization of new technologies. As new renewable, efficient technologies emerge - fresh economic structures replace the current industrial framework. The wind industry provides a tangible example of emerging transformation. According to Greenbiz.com, in 2008 wind energy capacity in the U.S. grew 50 percent, with parallel industry employment rising 35 percent. Nationwide - 85,000 people now work across the wind industry - jobs ranging from turbine manufacturing, wind farm construction, wind farm development and turbine maintenance.
But why is this market transformation different? With a multitude of statistics pointing to job growth and demand, the pattern of this shift isn’t that different. But the flavor of it is. Perhaps because the opportunity to convert consumerism into a vehicle of change is at hand. In the past, new technologies found a passive, receptive audience - a willing consumer base, malleable to the forces of the market. However, marketplace tolerance has been broken, and vast amounts of consumers are demanding a reboot of the economic framework - from financial markets to policy decisions to gas at the pumps. This market transformation is powered by a strange and unfamiliar economic environment. Old assumptions aren’t valid, conventional success metrics are invalid, and traditional business goals are irrelevant in a contracted landscape.
Witness the new GDP: outputs assessed by enhancing price-per-share earnings with C02 baselines and community involvement - opening new revenue streams, job creation and the supporting infrastructure of new markets and collaborative public-private business models. Oregon’s timber economy provides a glimpse into a new economic order. Once based exclusively on price of trees-per-ton cut, then shipped to market - declining timber values and environmental regulations push a different perspective. The forestry industry now seeks carbon sequestration strategies that put dollars into planting, not deforesting. Value is in the real estate and regeneration of a natural resource - seamlessly blending stewardship with significant economic development opportunity.
States like Oregon are in a prime position to lead this market transformation. Armed with a decades-long commitment to ’smart growth’ and strategic land-use and transportation planning decisions, coupled with a new generation of intelligence devoted to new-era, sustainable development and technologies - the rules of the ‘green game’ are set, and await innovative solutions. Specifically, the State of Oregon has quickly convened some of the brightest public-private minds to hammer out a stimulus spending plan to ignite markets through renewable energy, innovative transportation solutions and water conservation projects. Oregon relies on a unique collaborative approach and an ability to cash in on its decades of investment in sustainability. Translation: a rapid mobilization of a new supply chain - materials, knowledge, labor and demand for a regenerative economy, allowing Oregon to deliver the first blueprint and business case for nationwide market transformation.
At the end of the day this market transformation realigns expectations and scales down needs. It’s about refashioning into a more adaptive population: a vast collective entity accepts a new economic era measured, assessed and driven in ways that push us out of old comfort zones. It will force a recognition of - and payment for - the impact of choices across all treasured touch points. Only then, will we know we have arrived.
