There is now a huge amount of work going on in the field of sustainability innovation, but much of it is hidden behind closed doors and under the wraps of patents. Much of the work relates not to stuff that is tied to product features that obviously need protection, but to processes that can have wider benefit beyond company’s doors and gates.

GreenXchange is a means of facilitating sustainability innovation sharing in a controlled way, using the creative commons approach, using a platform for the creation and adoption of technologies that have the potential to solve important global or industry-wide challenges.

Nike and Creative Commons are calling upon other companies and stakeholders to bring the network efficiencies of open innovation to solving the problems of sustainability. GreenXchange will seek to bring together stakeholders in working groups to discuss strategies for advancing the commons by exploring ideas such as using patent pools, research non-assertions, and using technologies that support networked and community-based knowledge transfer and sharing.

Traditional collaboration is face-to-face. However, increasingly, modern collaboration, powered by the Web, is distributed. Examples of distributed collaboration include the Google search, the Wikipedia article, and the eBay auction, all which bring together disparate and distributed sources of information into a collaborative network mediated by common rules.