Gunter Pauli is an entrepreneur and author of The Blue Economy. He has been called "The Steve Jobs of sustainability".
Life and business
Gunter Pauli was born in 1956. He is a graduate in economics of Loyola College in Antwerp. He later obtained his MBA from INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France. He also has an honorary masters in systemic design from the Politecnico di Torino and an honorary doctorate in economics from the University of Pecs. He has been named an outstanding AIESEC alumnus. Pauli has lived on four continents and is fluent in seven languages. He has been a resident of Japan since 1994 and spends considerable time initiating and monitoring projects around the world. He is married to Katherina Bach and is the father of five sons and one adopted daughter. He has been active as an entrepreneur setting up a dozen companies, a lecturer at the Politecnico di Torino and the University of Pecs, and commentator in culture, science, politics, sustainability, innovation, and the environment for different media. He is a member of The Club of Rome and since 2017 member of the Executive Committee, and Chairman of Novamont SpA. He built the first ecological factory in the world as 50% shareholder, Chairman and CEO of Ecover. It was completed in 1992, under his leadership, and has received worldwide acclaim as an ecological building.
Literary career
His first book was a biography of Dr. Aurelio Peccei, founder of the Club of Rome, whom he assisted from 1979 to 1984. Since then he has written more than 20 books printed in 43 languages, and written 285 fables for children, of which 180 have been published in China. Some estimate that 90 million copies of his fables have been distributed worldwide. In 1989 he was elected as an independent substitute to the European Parliament, but never took up the seat. In 1991 Gunter Pauli was the founder of the "Mozarteum Belgicum", founder and president of Worldwatch Europe. In 1994 Pauli founded the Zero Emissions Research Initiative. ZERI started in Tokyo with the support of the Japanese government and United Nations University and targeted redesigning production and consumption into clusters of industries inspired by natural systems. Today ZERI is a network of 2,800 scientists, professors, and intellectuals continuously rethinking innovations to make business and operational processes as durable as possible. In 2009 he wrote the book The Blue Economy, which was originally a report to the Club of Rome. He wrote it with the twin aims of stimulating entrepreneurship and establishing higher standards for sustainability. It includes principles that support the blue economy concept and also one hundred business cases that follow the principles. The goals set for the blue economy as a business model are high: to create 100 million jobs and substantial capital value through 100 innovations in the 2010-2020 decade. The Blue Economy 2.0 was released in 2014 and The Blue Economy 3.0 in 2017, showing what had been achieved worldwide. In the fall of 2017 Pauli published The Third Dimension in cooperation with Jurriaan Kamp, describing the trends that shape The Blue Economy. The French edition was launched under a new title "Let us be as intelligent as Nature". In the Spring of 2018 Pauli published Plan A: The Transformation of the Argentinian Economy presenting 10 innovative sectors in the Argentinian economy applying The Blue Economy. Gunter Pauli is a best selling Belgian non-fiction author.
Works
International Marketing: The Importance of Image in Japan. Sophia University Press, 1983,
Aurelio Peccei: Portrait of the Founder of the Club of Rome. Pergamon Press, 1987,
Services: the driving force of the economy. Waterlow Press, 1987,
The Second Wave: Japan's Global Assault on Financial Services. Waterlow Press, 1987,
Towards a United Europe: 1992 and Beyond - Shaping Priorities for Successful Regional Integration. SRI International, 1990,
Double Digit Growth: How to Achieve it with Services. Pauli Publishing, 1991,
