How Big Green Data started

Our team came together during the Invent the Future workshop day. The theme was resources and all three of us wanted to create a social enterprise that influenced people’s behaviour to use resources more sustainably. I wrote up the experience of coming up with ideas in the workshop in a previous blog for Createlab.

The idea we were put through to the Venture Catalyst Challenge with was Big Green Data: harnessing existing data about consumer products (such as data on what that product is made from, how many air miles it has travelled to be in the consumers hands, etc.) and making that information more available and useful for consumers. If we created a way of getting that information out in an effective way it would act as a pressure on companies to make greener products. In whatever scenario this plays out in we would own data (which we have started finding but have not got yet) and we would have a positive green brand that companies would want to be associated with.

How would deliver this was the big question we kept coming back to. We could create a rating system of “how green” a product is, but that has been done so many times with so many rating systems it’s now just confusing and unhelpful. Say we did come up with a rating system that worked well and influenced behaviour. Our plan to make money from this was to allow companies to buy their data and the green rating we have given it.

We kept going round in circles trying to figure out how to make what is essentially an abstract idea happen and find ways to test whether it would actually work.

So now we are downsizing.