Lesson 3

Sustainable development and innovation management were among the topics discussed today. The insights provided by most of the speakers I must say were rather thought provoking and it got me thinking about certain topics more then others. In particular, the idea of sustainable development and making it happen as well as the idea of history being an open source.

For an idea that has been around since the 70’s, sustainable development is definitely taking a very long time to be implemented globally. From the discussions during class, it can be attributed to the fact that reallocating resources towards sustainable development would reduce the productivity thus reducing the current levels of profit one stands to gain. Therefore, you can have companies agreeing to cut down carbon emissions and focus on sustainable development but at the same time sticking to their normal framework of productivity. Upon further reading on environmentalleader.com, it states that US companies under the “Carbon market readiness: accounting, compliance, reporting and tax considerations under state and national carbon emissions programs, companies should consider their carbon emissions under their business and financial requirements allowing for proper taxation to be done. However many of these companies do not actually report this for tax considerations or continue to be inconsistent about information provided. So on the one hand they can agree toward a sustainable development but on the other hand their actions are not congruent.

So from this and it has been something I have been noticing throughout the 3 weeks of TWC, Regulators can only do so much. It is more the willingness of the party to want to make that change towards progress that has a positive impact on future generations. We need to start being accountable and make the change.

The presentation on Wikipedia was something I think is relevant to us because of the era that we live in. Should history be open source? Why not? The history made especially in this day and age happens to everyone. Think Obama getting elected, it affected the world. The housing bubble that subsequently led to the financial crisis in US and the a global recession happened to everyone. Even when the Iphone 4 was released. The point here is that we are all interconnected therefore to reiterate, history happens to everyone. So it is valid for anyone to have a say in it. However if history is allowed to be open source then we must also be prepared to filter for ourselves what is credible and what is not.

An issue that would be fitting for further discussion is perhaps how we can incorporate sustainable development into our lives as fast as possible rather then waiting for guidelines and regulations to be passed.