ABSTRACT
How do environmental groups compare the public and for-profit sectors in terms of their ability to innovate? One interviewee speculated that ‘economists and scientists [employed by voluntary groups] come up with the new solutions: if we waited for government scientists to come up with solutions we would be waiting until the end of time!’ The extent to which environmental organizations have at least the potential to be relatively innovative is implied by examples given above, but there seems to be little or no direct comparative evidence. Most of our informants did not feel able to make such general claims, and aside from the single Greenpeace-Shell information technology example, we were unable to find a specific basis for direct comparison. Even here, one voluntary sector interviewee stressed the extent to which many voluntary organizations remained extremely wary of, and averse to modern technology, implying that the for-profit sector was basically the primary conduit for new ideas of this sort. Moreover, a for-profit interviewee suggested that Greenpeace’s apparent ability to outwit Shell in its use of information technology and news management techniques with the Brent Spar incident was something of an isolated example. The company had learned a lot from the ‘shock’, and was now at least as adept at managing information flows to present its own case.
