(Justmeans.com / CSR News) - March 10, 2010 | Posted by Dave Witzel

An important objective of Environmental Defense Fund's Innovation Exchange is to connect with other people who work at the nexus of business and sustainability and make the whole network more effective. We believe networking and shared learning are central to the rapid innovation needed to dramatically improve sustainability in business. We want to know who you are, what you are doing and to give you the opportunity to know what we are doing and learning.

Therefore, we are maintaining a number of networking channels to help us find each other as well as communications channels to help us inform each other. We hope you'll join in by connecting with us, following what we're doing and sharing back your activities, products and lessons. Here are some ways:

Let's meet face-to-face. We're helping organize a series of 1-day events in cities around the country.  These "Green Innovation in Business Solutions Labs" are "open space" events with lots of opportunity to network and share experience. We will be in 10 cities in 2010. In addition to Durham, NC (where we were in January), we'll have events in Washington DC, New York, Fayetteville, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, San Jose, Boston, and Austin. To get announcements about Solutions Labsadd your email address to the list.  You'll get a few emails each month letting you know what's coming up next as well as reports from the Solutions Labs after they happen. activity,

If you can't make one of the Solutions Labs, you can look for us at another event in which we are participating. We keep a calendar of "events of interest" and mark the ones where you can find EDF staff. You can find out what we look like and are interested in on these individual Corporate Partnerships team bio pages.

Talk to us via phone. We host EDFix Conference Calls twice a month which featuring doers and thinkers of note. You can join us for these calls every 2nd and 4th Monday at 9 AM PT (noon ET). To receive announcements about upcoming calls and find out what happened in calls you missed, add your email address to this list.  We send emails to announce the topics a few days before each call, as well as "afterthoughts" a few days after each call.

Staying in-touch on-line.

• The best way to learn about what we are doing is to follow postings to the Innovation Exchange blog. Almost all our activities and new materials end up on the blog in some  form. You can follow via RSS feed or email [1 email every weekday or two].
• We have organized lessons learned, tools and other guidance developed from our 20 years of experience working with business on our Innovation Exchange website.
• We also use Twitter daily. You can follow us @EDFix and tag your tweets with #EDFix to be sure we see them.
• We maintain a set of "bookmarks" of what we are reading on Del.icio.us – you can visit Delicious or subscribe to our feed using Google Reader to see green business, innovation and other stories that we think are interesting.

Following one of our projects. Perhaps you don't want to know about everything we are doing, but would like to hear news about a specific project.  You can sign-up for project-specific email announcements for these projects [each tends to generate less than one email per week]:

• Private equity / Green Returns – work with KKR and other private equity firms
• Fleet vehicles – work with car and truck fleets
• Climate Corps – MBA students work with companies on energy efficiency
• Walmart Partnership – on-going, multi-faceted work with Walmart

(Note: if you are already signed up for all the blog announcements, you don't need to sign up for the projects too.)

Tracking EDFix Strategy. If you are really interested in the objectives and approach of EDF's Innovation Exchange – details about what we are thinking, planning to do, and why – please participate in the EDF Innovation Exchange Community Google Group, which contains strategy and planning documents we're using as we set up and assess our work. Sign-up with the group to participate. [There is a low level of email activity.]

Contact me. If all else fails, contact me — 202 572 3250 via phone, dwitzel@edf.org via email, @dwitzel (or @EDFix) on twitter or on Linkedin.

I'm looking forward to being in touch.