Sponsored Projects

Founded in 1802, DuPont offers a wide range of innovative products and services for markets including agriculture, nutrition, electronics, communications, safety and protection, home and construction, transportation, and apparel.

Project: The SGE Immersion team evaluated the development and refinement of DuPont’s corporate efforts and worked with the company’s businesses to formulate strategic direction and tools that would allow the company to identify the issues/opportunities associated with sustainable growth. The goal of this project was to facilitate efforts to move beyond simply reducing the company’s environmental footprint and into driving the investment in growth opportunities that addressed social and environmental issues.

Clean Energy Group (CEG) is a non-profit organization dedicated to greater use of cleaner energy technologies, such as fuel cells and solar, in newly restructured energy markets.

Project: The Clean Energy Group was instrumental in the formation and management of the “Clean Energy Investment Working Group”— a peer-facilitated network for pension funds, institutional investors and other fiduciaries to explore interests in developing enhanced, environmentally responsive investment strategies in the clean energy sub-sector that can deliver competitive returns. The Working Group included investment officers from over 3 dozen public pensions and private foundations, with over $1 trillion under management. The SGE Immersion team recommended investment strategies for institutional investors in each of the relevant asset classes, including private equity, public equity, real estate and project finance as part of a process for developing and publishing a set of “model portfolio” recommendations for institutional investor actions.

Cascade Engineering is a leader in engineered plastic systems and components.

Project: A water purification device that utilizes a large concrete structure had been developed for deployment to low-income markets suitable for large-scale applications. The SGE Immersion team analyzed how Cascade could go to market with a smaller, plasticized version of the filter to low-income customers for more distributed (family and multi-family) applications.

AguaClara is a project in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University that is improving drinking water quality through innovative research, knowledge transfer, open source engineering and design of sustainable, replicable water treatment systems.

Project: This project focused on helping the AguaClara engineering team to consider the market variables so important for technology commercialization. Students developed recommendations for the venture to scale their operations to disseminate village-scale water treatment technology.

BoP Protocol- Kenya (2005-2008 In 2005 a six-person S. C. Johnson & Son, Inc. team led by Cornell University initiated a BoP Protocol project in Kenya. The team worked in the Nairobi slums of Kibera, Mathare, and Mitumba and in the rural village of Nyota Township. The team entered the community without any pre-conceived business intentions; instead, they worked to build close relationships in each of the communities through home-stays and by participating in their hosts’ daily lives. In the Nairobi slum of Kibera, the team cooked and sold “mandazi” (a Kenyan fried bread) by the roadside, collected trash and sorted recyclables with a youth group, and sold hand-stitched clothing from a small kiosk.)

Project: The three month effort resulted in the co-creation of a new business concept called “Community Cleaning Services” (CCS) that partnered S. C. Johnson & Son, Inc. with self-help youth groups living in Nairobi’s slums. CCS was initially conceptualized as a direct-to-home business that would provide a combination of home cleaning, sanitation, and pest control services. Over the years the business has evolved to provide sanitation services to semi-public and multi-family shared toilets.