As William McDonough wrote in his book Cradle to Cradle, we should stop thinking of post-consumer goods as "waste", and instead start thinking of them as "food" in the product chain - upcycling raw materials and turning them into useful raw materials, rather than just alleviating the burden offset by recycling. Sun Microsystems' CTO Greg Papadopoulos looks at this challenge from the perspective of engineering, and encourages the technical and scientific sectors to think not in terms of product degradation, but to look at manufacturing and design in terms of disassembly and endless reuse.

Using and understanding intellectual legal rights can be an asset to engineers, says former Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos. In this clip, Papadopoulos explains the difference between patents, copyrights, and trademarks, and what each will allow for the inventor under the law. How they govern the laws of sharing intellectual property via open source can apply to any business model - from software code, to hi-end chocolate, to mechanically-engineered prosthetic limbs.

All of the smart people don't work for you. So how can an organization harness a broader intellect and get them to work on their projects? Keep your ideas free and accessible, and share them with anyone willing to participate. This kind of product innovation and reinvention creates community beyond the company walls, says Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun Microsystems, whether it's a devoted team of engineers or users. In the end, if a business is willing to allow others to have a hand in its technology and development, they will benefit from a finer finished product overall.

Failure is a very important part of the learning process in Silicon Valley, says Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun Microsystems. And people should disrupt themselves frequently and as inexpensively as possible. An organization not on its game will allow an upstart to dislodge their market foothold more easily or for less cost, thereby putting you out of business. Instead, the successful, stable enterprise will constantly question their own efforts and their own technologies and learn how to cannibalize their own actions. Papadopoulis cites as an example a recent Intel processor powering a fleet of netbooks. While they are taking market share away from their own flagship processors, it's better for Intel to usurp themselves, rather than to be crushed under a competitor's innovation.