UTS is hosting three Big Top Tents as part of the worldwide Disruptive Innovation Festival being curated by the UK-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
The Disruptive Innovation Festival (DiF) will run from 2-20 November. The foundation says the aim is to bring together "thought leaders, entrepreneurs, businesses, makers, learners and doers to catalyse system-level change for a future, regenerative economy".
Using a mix of online and face-to-face events, participants share and explore the ways they are challenging the linear ‘take, make and dispose’ model of the economy. At the inaugural festival in 2014, there were over 200 sessions and 23,000 session views from 170 countries on the DiF website. This year promises to be even bigger.
The program this year includes headline speakers such as co-founder of the Cradle to Cradle design philosophy Michael Braungart; sharing economy and shareable cities expert April Rinne; L. Hunter Lovins, co-author of the seminal book Natural Capitalism; and Robin Chase, a co-founder of Zipcar, a pioneer in the car sharing movement.
UTS joins a line-up of leading universities from around the world in hosting three Big Top Tents, “spaces” where participants can take part in – personally or virtually – public talks and online courses related to resource productivity and sustainable supply networks.
“The UTS Big Top Tents will allow us to share with a global audience our research into new ways of doing business that challenge the traditional linear approach,” says Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at UTS Business School, Suzanne Benn.
“These approaches are being taken up by future-oriented enterprises that are pursuing sustainability agendas.”
Researchers from UTS’s Institute for Sustainable Futures and UTS Business School are engaged in projects exploring new business models that support the circular economy. These include the Wealth from Waste project funded by the national science organisation CSIRO and involving collaborators from CSIRO and universities around Australia as well as Yale in the United States.
“Raising awareness about a circular economy is crucial to wider recognition of the environmental benefits from this approach to business,” says Associate Professor Damien Giurco, who heads the UTS Wealth from Waste research project.
“We are currently working on the metal industry in Australia but this approach is relevant to many other industry sectors.”
As part of its Big Top Tent program, in partnership with the Sustainability Advantage Program at the Office of Environment & Heritage NSW, UTS will run a novel “network teardown” with stakeholders in the glass industry to identify blockages and opportunities to prolong the life of glass, and to reuse, refurbish and recycle it.
Glass is a truly circular product because it doesn’t degrade when recycled, yet currently in Australia around 40 per cent of glass goes to landfill.
The concept of network teardown, a method being developed by a team of researchers at UTS, and outcomes from the glass workshop will be presented via webinar in the second UTS Big Top Tent.
The DiF itself takes a disruptive approach, with all events hosted locally but broadcast globally through an online platform, says Dr Melissa Edwards of UTS Business School, who is coordinating the involvement of the UTS team.
“People will be able to take part from their home or office or on any mobile device,” Dr Edwards says.
“This drastically cuts the carbon miles usually accumulated by international conferences and conventions when delegates converge in one geographical location.”