About the Global Commerce Forum
The mission of the Global Commerce Forum (GCF), a not for profit organization, is to promote multi-sector research in clean technologies, energy efficiency, and worldwide collaboration among businesses, academic institutions, national governments and not for profit organizations engaged in initiatives supportive of a clean global environment.
Fostering this multi-sector collaboration is a response to the recognition of the harmful impact of local and global commerce on the environment and the realization that the effort to reduce the carbon footprint is in most cases clustered: the academicians, the business community, government agencies, national governments, not for profit organizations and research centers usually embark on low carbon initiatives without any awareness of what other organizations are doing. This lack of awareness leads to duplication of effort thus wasting valuable resources as organizations re-invent what is already. To avoid such waste, groups and individual organizations need to know what other groups are doing, through a well coordinated collaborative environment. The shared knowledge would then serve as a foundation for future green initiatives. Such an approach would reduce the costs of integrating sustainable initiatives in operations, communities or governments at local, national and global levels and accelerate the trajectory towards a cleaner and sustainable global economy.
The forum also recognizes the need for adept leadership. The Forum also promotes input from the business, government and not for profit organizations regarding the current and future challenges facing these communities to ascertain the needed skills and knowledge of graduates from institutions of higher learning. The input will allow educators to adjust their curricula, content delivery, research, and teaching methodologies to ensure the current and anticipated labor needs are met.
To this end, the Global Commerce Forum holds conferences to provide a platform for business executives, global scholars, researchers, practitioners, analysts, scientists, designers, engineers, vendors, service providers, legislators, manufacturers and anyone involved in commerce to exchange expertise, experiences, best practices, tools, technologies, and strategies supportive of a clean global economy in addition to assessing how existing or upcoming regulations/policies would affect such efforts. The conferences(with speakers drawn from all over the world), allow participants to grasp the challenges faced by other organizations and how these challenges are being addressed to find a common ground for collaboration thus leveraging the scarce resources by reducing the duplication of effort.
The conferences focus on the transportation (logistics) and energy industries because these industries constitute a large percentage of the business transactions and therefore better positioned to drive the effort more forcefully. The solutions and innovations discussed are relevant and applicable to any industry.
The Global Commerce Forum also publishes a peer-reviewed journal: the Journal of Global Commerce Research (www.Journalofglobalcommerceresearch.com), to share research in all facets of business ranging from global commerce to information technology.
