The Greens

Working with my friend, Nils Davis, we now have some in-person meetings going in the Silicon Valley Area. Nils hosted his first Green Building Salon at the Round Table Pizza in Menlo Park, CA. Attendees represented a wide variety of backgrounds, including architecture, marketing, interior design, and product management.

Nils observed in his notes several themes that came up, including the role of liability in holding back innovation in the building industry, the perception that green is more expensive than brown, and that success will require that the whole green market move across the chasm from early adopters to mainstream (a concept promoted by Geoffrey Moore).

A number of attendees are looking for career changes that will land them a “green” job. As I noticed at the recent State of Green Business Forum, pinning down exactly what a “green job” is eludes even the experts. But, on an individual level, it’s not too hard to identify what it means. For me, it would be a paying job in the home building professions (architecture, engineering, construction or whatever) that combines my experience as an alliance manager with my background in understanding green building needs. For Kirsten at our meeting, it would be finding interior design clients who are “green enough”. (I think this means that care about what they put in their homes—Is it non-toxic? Is it from environmentally sustainable materials? Etc.) For others, such as Janice or Corinne, it might be a job with a solar company or a role in marketing translating between the green needs of clients and the green desires of the company. For Phil and other architects, it might mean finding differentiators that lead to green business.

As a result of the meeting, Nils is setting up a new professional group on LinkedIn that will bring together people who are looking for green jobs. (You can visit the group here, but you need a LinkedIn account to join.)

One huge value to this group is bringing together such a variety of backgrounds. Attendees had backgrounds in textile design, evidence-based design, daylighting, market adoption, congressional activity, the semiconductor industry, and much more.

More Green Salons are planned. In addition, Green Making will be sponsoring a similar in-person meeting in Sunnyvale on 11 February 2009 at the Palace Café on Murphy Street, Sunnyvale, CA. This meeting will focus more on residential green building and we are inviting everyone in the area who has an interest in building green homes. This will be an informal, round-table meeting for us to get together and get to know each other. Future meeting will probably include a short presentation by someone in the trade.

Information about all meetings can be found on our Meetup group Green Making for the Silicon Valley Area. Join Meetup.com and keep these meetings on your calendar!

–Rich Wingerter

Tags: Green Jobs, Green Making Meetings, Green Salon, LinkedIn, Silicon Valley Area

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 at 3:54 pm and is filed under By Organizer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.