BeeP Blog

The Green Products Innovation Institute will launch today, spreading Cradle to Cradle practices throughout industry.  We’ll be tweeting today from the event at the Google Campus.  Check it out @bluepractice

The Financial Times broke the story last night:

It is hardly the most orthodox route to business success. Having spent two decades building a company with a leading position in a highly promising global industry, Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart have decided to take a back seat – not by selling out but by donating the intellectual property behind their enterprise to a non-profit organisation.

Mr McDonough, a US architect, and Mr Braungart, a German chemist, head McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, an environmental consultancy based in Charlottesville, Virginia, which measures the “environmental footprint” of a product’s supply chain. Their process is based on an exceptionally rigorous set of criteria and is allied to a set of procedures for creating new chemicals that they call a “cradle-to-cradle” system.

Until now, their methods have been a closely guarded secret. But they hope today’s launch of the Green Products Innovation Institute in San Francisco will be a mechanism to create hundreds of other businesses around the world using their method. The idea is to spread the philosophy much faster – and wider – than if the original entrepreneurs kept control of their ideas.

Registered FT readers can read the rest of the piece here.