Volans Ventures

ACCELERATOR OF CHANGE

Volans Ventures systematically connects and integrates the worlds of social and environmental innovation with business-driven wealth creation.

Our partners and clients come from four key sectors:

• Social ventures that need help in scaling up their successes in fast-growing and sustainability-driven markets—and in ramping up their efficiency and effectiveness.
• Global corporations, financial institutions and cities committed to growing their businesses and/or economies by reinvigorating their strategies and people—and reinventing their business and/or economic models.
• Public servants and agencies determined to harness the power of social and corporate partners and surrogates to achieve the public good in tougher times.
• Intermediaries serving the above constituencies.

There is new urgency to finding and implementing solutions to critical economic, social, and environmental problems—including climate change, poverty alleviation, access to medicines and human rights.

Innovative solutions already exist. They have been designed, tested, refined and implemented by innovators and entrepreneurs worldwide. Some have found ways to provide high quality drugs and diagnostics to the poor at prices they can afford. Others offer new ways to use information technology to dramatically improve education, health care, and access to credit, insurance and markets for low-income communities. Still others have devised business models that improve access to clean water, affordable housing, more nutritious food and renewable energy.

Volans opens up these high-impact innovations to companies, policy makers and investors so that they can be replicated, scaled and strengthened far beyond what a single entrepreneur and his/her organization could ever hope to achieve.

Based in London, Geneva and Singapore, Volans is spearheaded by a founding team whose members have helped to define the business strategy, sustainable development and social entrepreneurship agendas over decades. They are:

• John Elkington, co-founder of SustainAbility (established 1987) , based in London, New York, Washington, D.C. and, from later in 2008, India. John is a best-selling author, described by BusinessWeek in 2004 as “a dean of the corporate responsibility movement for three decades.” He has served as chair or member of many boards and advisory boards in the public, private and citizen sectors.
• Pamela Hartigan, until recently Managing Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship (from its inception) , Geneva, Switzerland, is an author, academic, and former Director at the World Health Organisation (WHO), and Chief at the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).
• Kevin Teo, Global Leadership Fellow at the World Economic Forum and Head of East and Southeast Asia at the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. He previously developed enterprise software systems at Silicon Valley startups and now runs our Asia operations from Singapore.

Volans Ventures operates through Volans Connects and Volans Advisory.