In this International Business Briefing hosted by the CJBS Alumni Relations team, Chris Coleridge combines insights from his research with examples on how leading organisations are addressing these challenges.

For anyone born after about 1965, the dominant challenge and opportunity in entrepreneurship has been to enable the economic changes opened up to us by the potential of a new general purpose technology – the internet – and its ancillary/derivative techs. Now, climate tech is on the rise, and the engine of Schumpeterian recombination is not a new tech, but a newly recognised problem—one with existential significance. How does this change the “game” in entrepreneurship, and how is the venture capital industry evolving to meet this opportunity? This short talk will be illustrated with examples from Carbon13, “the venture builder for the climate emergency”, founded by Chris Coleridge in 2019.

We are grateful to our hosts EY Climate Change & Sustainability Services.

Speaker bio
Chris is Management Practice Associate Professor in CJBS and a Fellow of Wolfson College. He came to Cambridge in 2016 to found the Masters in Entrepreneurship at Cambridge Judge, having previously been director of the MSc in Technology Entrepreneurship at University College London and of the Innovation Co-Creation Lab at the London School of Economics. But in 2019, “inspired” by Greta Thunberg, he decided to devote the remainder of his career to innovation in Net Zero and carbon capture. He founded Carbon13 with a colleague from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and a German serial entrepreneur who had been his student at UCL many years before. In the last 12 months Carbon13 has made 32 pre-seed investments in climate tech startups with the potential at scale to take at least 10m tonnes CO2e from the emissions base.

Agenda
18:30 | Registration
19:00 | Business briefing ‘Net Zero Entrepreneurship’ by Chris Coleridge, Management Practice Associate Professor
19:45 | Networking with drinks and canapes
20:45 | Close