Thomas Edison once said: "Restlessness and discontent are the first necessities of progress." Well, the company he founded, General Electric, is far from happy about the protectionism now practised in the environmental sector in China, India and, yes, the US. John Krenicki, chief executive of GE's energy business, warns that those using climate change to justify protectionist forms of "green industrial policy" are playing an "extremely dangerous" game. It is a game, he reports, that is spreading worldwide.

More worrying still was the call by India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, for a weakening of intellectual property rights for green technology. He insisted that such knowhow should be treated as a "global public good". The possibility that such countries will use the same arguments on green technology that they used to win access to medicines will ring alarm bells in boardrooms worldwide.

Meanwhile, GE thinks it has spotted an even more fundamental trend regarding the future of innovation and globalisation. Writing in Harvard Business Review, GE chairman and chief executive Jeffrey Immelt predicts a sea change in global markets. For decades, companies such as GE have sold modified western products, including green technologies, to emerging markets. Now they are trying to pre-empt the emerging market giants by putting that process into reverse.

Globalisation has been driven by "glocalization"—rich world companies developing new products in their home markets and then distributing them globally. In contrast, Immelt argues that companies such as GE must now disrupt their own businesses, learning the art of "reverse innovation", developing products in countries such as Brazil, China and India, and then distributing them worldwide.

It will be fascinating as this restless, discontented century wrestles with challenges such as climate, biodiversity, poverty and pandemic risks to see how leading firms in China, India and Brazil react to claims that their own hard-won technologies and products should become global goods.

John Elkington is co-founder of SustainAbility and Volans (www.volans.com).