Friction, they say, makes the pearl and I have long described the work I do as being like putting grit into corporate oysters. But sometimes the process works in reverse. That certainly happened in the early stages of May's World Business Summit on Climate Change, held in Copenhagen as a stepping stone to December's COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

There was nothing wrong with the agenda: "Shaping the Sustainable Economy". The speakers were well chosen, from Al Gore
and Rajendra Pachauri, who heads the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to the CEOs of companies such as PepsiCo, Unilever, Deutsche Post, Virgin Atlantic, PricewaterhouseCoopers and so on. And it's hard to complain when a conference is kicked off by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and treated to a no-holds-barred wake-up call from Cate Blanchett.

But I was soon suffering from an acute fit of mental indigestion, as the high bar set by early speakers was more or less ignored by moderators of later high-level panels. At times, it was as if CEOs were being asked to tell us how cool their companies were as global citizens, rather than how they were developing cool (in the sense of climate-friendly) technologies and business models.

Then the BBC's Nik Gowing took over, noting that he sensed a good deal of frustration with progress to date. He turned up the heat under his panel on the final day. And it responded. I was soon scribbling furiously as Sir Crispin Tickell, the man who "greened" Margaret Thatcher, protested about the "feeble show put up by environment ministers" and, led by Gore's colleague, David Blood from Generation Investment Management, several CEOs called for concerted action against companies lobbying to stall progress.

I left Copenhagen determined to help build a new movement around cool consumerism, like the green consumer movement we launched in 1988. We plan a Cool Who's Who, to spotlight and quiz the global climate elite, and would like to hear from Director readers who are creating tomorrow's climate-friendly "pearls", be they technologies, business models or value webs.

John Elkington is co-founder of Volans. His latest publication is The Phoenix Economy: 50 pioneers in the business of social innovation