Core77

In case you missed it, a great piece over at BusinessWeek about the birth of a new set of green design principles entitled The Designers Accord. We've got input from many key players in sustainable design, including our own Allan Chochinov.

What's striking about the piece is not so much the formal list of principles, but the "rules" for play:

"We are talking about sharing high-level learnings about methodology and process, much as the management consulting industry does," says Ideo's Tim Brown.

and

"By pooling our resources, this should mitigate the investment" that each firm would need to make in sustainability research and training, says Valerie Casey, who says that as a student at Yale she was influenced by research done by her professor Barry Nalebuff into co-opetition.

There's a theme emerging here. In one of our features this month, civil engineer, Tom Seager states that, "Sustainability requires cooperation." Right on. So, forget that cut-throat competitive model they beat into us at business school and get back to what they taught us in kindergarten: sharing and playing well with others is the name of the game.