Tim Smith

Tim Smith

Professor

Sustainable Systems Management

Education

Expertise

Dr. Timothy M. Smith is professor of sustainable systems management and international business at the University of Minnesota, where he is also the founding director of the NorthStar Initiative for Sustainable Enterprise and LINK at the Institute on the Environment. Throughout his career, he has developed integrative approaches to sustainable systems performance measurement and decisionmaking within the contexts of supply chain management, product/process design, marketing and public policy.  Smith''s research has been published in a broad array of toptier scholarly journals, including the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, Environmental Science & Technology, Journal of Industrial Ecology, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Bioresource Technology, Global Environmental Change, International Journal of LifeCycle Assessment, Energy Policy, Environmental Science and Policy, International Journal of Research in Marketing, and Journal of Marketing Research. His work has also been highlighted in Bloomberg, The Conversation, Huffington Post, The Guardian, GreenBiz, Sustainable Brands, and other trade and local press. Dr. Smith has held the rotating chair in sustainable entrepreneurship at Wageningen University, Netherlands (2011), and has served on the faculty at INCAE Business School in Costa Rica (2007; 2017). He teaches undergraduates, graduate students and executives in courses on sustainability management systems and strategy, systems thinking and analysis, and corporate sustainability and social responsibility –  earning him numerous awards for teaching excellence and community engagement. Dr. Smith also actively advises governmental agencies on energy and public procurement policies, and consults numerous companies and organizations on advancing sustainability.

Selected Works

Kim, S., Kim, T., Smith, T.M., Suh, K., 2018. Environmental Implications of EcoLabeling for Rice Farming Systems. Sustainability, doi:10.3390/su10041033

Jordan, N.R., Dorn, K.M., Smith, T.M., Wolf, K.E., Ewing, P.M., Fernandez, A.L., Runck, B.C., Williams, A., Lu, Y. and Kuzma, J., 2017. A cooperative governance network for crop genome editing: The success of governance networks in other areas could help to find common ground for applying genome editing in agriculture. EMBO reports, 18(10), 16831687.

Li, M., Smith, T.M., Yang, Y. and Wilson, E.J., 2017. Marginal Emission Factors Considering Renewables: A Case Study of the US MidContinent Independent System Operator (MISO) System. Environmental science & technology, 51(19), pp.1121511223.

Smith, T.M., Goodkind, A.L., Kim, T., Pelton, R.E., Suh, K. and Schmitt, J., 2017. Subnational mobility and consumptionbased environmental accounting of US corn in animal protein and ethanol supply chains. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(38), pp.E7891E7899.

Pelton, R.E.O., Li, M., Smith, T.M., Lyon, T. 2016. Optimizing EcoEfficiency Across the Procurement Portfolio, Environmental Science & Technology, 50 (11), 59085918.

Current Activities

Current Research

Link at the Institute on the Environment brings together partner organizations, each with their own sustainability challenge, and pairs them with dedicated research teams drawn from worldclass UMN faculty, students and scholars. Each problem receives focused attention and a swift solution, while the opportunity to work on individual challenges in tandem with others yields collective insight. Through Link, organizations across multiple sectors gain critical information and decisionmaking capacity, accelerating the transition to a more sustainable future.

Link at IonE The NorthStar Initiative for Sustainable Enterprise (NiSE), a program at the INSTITUTE ON THE ENVIRONMENT, works with the private sector – both forprofit and nonprofit alike – to understand the systemic sustainability challenges of rapidly expanding production and consumption systems, develop the decision tools necessary to effectively act on these systems, and accelerate innovation beyond marginal greening efforts to more meaningful change.

NiSE