Branson’s Learning Curve, Virgin Earth Challenge
This is the first of four posts in a series.
Sir Richard Branson is a self-described business newbie, a virgin, which reflects two things about him. First, he is often the first person into a category where there are no role models. Second, this means he typically improvises until he has a solution and often it’s something new or at least creative. For example, in airlines he rediscovered the virtues of treating passengers as people, not cargo. The marketplace rewarded this simple creativity with an empire of multiple airlines, now part of the Virgin Group, and made him a rich man.
There are many other endeavors where Branson entered markets late, applied people skills, and reaped rewards. But one place where Branson’s brand of creativity and innovation has yet to provide measurable results has been his effort to slow climate change. His Virgin Earth Challenge (VEC) was designed to recruit talented innovators from around the world to tackle a seemingly simple problem, remove one billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere per year for ten years, and keep it out.
Is a billion tons a lot? No, not really; there are between 5 and 7 trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere right now and humanity is putting more than 40 billion tons there each year. But removing a billion tons would be a credible demonstration project as…
