Silver linings: Adapting to virtual learning yields unexpected benefits

With each crisis comes opportunity.  The coronavirus pandemic has changed our work, travel, community engagement, and social lives in profound ways this year.  And perhaps nowhere has adaptation had to happen faster than in the world of higher education.  With eleven degree programs and more than 1,800 students enrolled when the coronavirus started spreading, the […]

Planning underway for 2020 ClimateCAP Summit

ClimateCAP banner

EDGE executive director Dan Vermeer has joined the Program Committee for the 2020 ClimateCAP Summit.  Conceptualized and first hosted at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, ClimateCAP is a partnership between 16 top-tier business schools, including Wharton, Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, and MIT, along with Duke and others. The 2020 Summit will be hosted by the University […]

The next phase of industrialization will happen in our oceans

oceans shipping photo

By Dan Vermeer, Associate Professor of the Practice and Executive Director, EDGE Oceans cover more than 70% of the planet’s surface, hold almost 95% of the world’s biodiversity, and produce over two-thirds of our oxygen.  However, it is less well-known that ocean-related industries are a major part of the global economy; in fact, the ocean […]

Dan Vermeer discusses climate change as a “wicked problem” in Dow “Elements of Sustainability Series”

Video: Dan Vermeer

As part of Dow Chemical’s “Elements of Sustainability Series”, Professor Dan Vermeer discusses how methods of design thinking and scenario planning can be productively used to tackle perhaps the world’s most wicked problem: climate change. — RELATED ARTICLES: Business schools start preparing graduates for a world of climate risks Video: Katherine Neebe, Director of Sustainability, […]

Designing a career that matters: Advice to the incoming class

Dan Vermeer, teaching class

By Dan Vermeer, Associate Professor of the Practice and Executive Director, EDGE Last week marked the beginning of a new academic year at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business—and for a new class of MBA students, the beginning of a new adventure.  Even at this early date, anxiety about career choices is at high pitch. […]

Cuba: Navigating energy choices for the future

Many countries, including the U.S., are in the midst of thinking about changes to their electric power and transportation energy systems as new technologies, new sources of energy, and new energy and environmental policies reshape energy sector dynamics globally.  Cuba is one country where change will come perhaps most quickly.  The reestablishment of diplomatic relations […]

Partnering for Cuba’s energy transition

Jim Rogers in Cuba

By Dan Vermeer, Associate Professor of the Practice and Executive Director, EDGE Cuba’s energy infrastructure, like its fleet of pre-1959 vintage American cars, is an amalgam of old and new, based on efforts to evolve the system with limited resources. A decentralized network consisting mostly of diesel and fuel oil generators is connected to a […]

Duke Hosts U.S. Business Council for Sustainable Development

US BCSD meeting 2017

Approximately 60 business leaders and faculty discussed corporate sustainability issues at the Winter Meeting of the U.S. Business Council for Sustainable Development (US BCSD), held at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business in January 2017.  The two-day meeting covered a wide range of topics under the theme of “Making Markets, Moving Markets.” US BCSD is a […]

“Triple convergence” of trends shape the future of leadership in the electric utility industry

Triple convergence of forces shaping the utility industry

The utility sector is in a period of reinvention. In the coming decades, nearly the entire power generating fleet in the U.S. will be replaced (no small feat for a sector with approximately $1.5 trillion in assets). Almost as dramatic as this infrastructure turnover is the leadership challenge facing the industry: more than half of […]

Dan Vermeer discusses business response to climate change

Video: PowerShift: The Business Role in Addressing Climate Change

Dan Vermeer, Executive Director of the Center for Energy, Development, and the Global Environment (EDGE) and Associate Professor of the Practice at Fuqua School of Business discusses how leading companies should respond to the threat of climate change in a new video.  Climate change trends present very real risks to companies, but as Vermeer sees […]