re-Commerce: A New Paradigm for Innovation and Sustainability in CSET Education

Both Entrepreneurship and Sustainability are important concepts in Computer Science Engineering and Technology (CSET) education, and this paper illustrates a new pathway to link these two concepts. re-Commerce combines the waste management concepts of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle with the Icelandic fullvinnsla concept of full utilization to create a new paradigm, re-Commerce. re-Commerce is defined as the questioning of fundamental axioms in an industry in order to reexamine what we have assumed are constraints (either market, monetary or scientifically derived) to re-vision or revise an industry to fully utilize waste materials by re-tooling manufacturing processes, thereby re-inventing/re-structuring the commercial impact of the industry or product. The paradigm of re-Commerce has been used in Maine as a lens for examining the lobster industry. The New England Ocean Cluster (NEOC) is re-examining the waste in the lobster industry, re-visioning it as a valuable commodity, and working to re-tool manufacturing industries to take advantage of this commodity. The paradigm of re-Commerce may also be applied as a tool for CSET students to perform analyses of production or manufacturing processes, and in the way that educators approach team design based education. This work in process paper shows the development of the re-Commerce paradigm and its application in education among CSET students.