The Future Unicorns of Edtech, piece 2: Education + Climate = Change
There is a lot of enthusiasm for the future of education and work, but we need more bold, crazy and exciting ideas that challenge the status quo and inspire the future. At Emerge, we see the world as founders do and keep seeing opportunities for companies that don’t exist and we think really have to be built.
This new series, ‘The Future Unicorns of Edtech’, is full of short, sharp and unpolished ideas for the future of learning and work. These have come from the thousands of conversations we have each year with our community. As a first check VC we believe in being there from the start, and would love to see the best of these ideas getting built.
Would we invest in all of them? Maybe. Have we done a lot of research on them? Sometimes. Is anyone already doing or thinking about this? The world is a big place, so most likely yes, in which case we would love to talk to you!
THE TL;DR IDEA
Education + Climate = Change
A one stop shop for individuals and employees to raise awareness, educate themselves, act on climate change and understand their own impact on our planet.
THE PROBLEM
Let’s be real. Climate change is real
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that human activities of burning fossil fuels, deforestation and agriculture are the leading causes of climate change. If we don’t act now as individuals, employees and communities, we risk destroying Earth as our habitat.
People really care about climate change
What used to be a scientific theory with a small following is now accepted by the mainstream. There are very few topics in the world today that get people as excited and emotional as climate change. For example, in the UK a quarter of citizens consider climate change to be the number one issue facing the country (second only to Brexit), up from 2% in 2016.
Across various surveys, employees are making it clear they prefer to work for companies with robust environmental policies, invest more effort in a job if their employer has a sustainability agenda and are even willing to take pay cuts.
Companies are not doing enough
Despite the rise in awareness and pressure, employers are still not doing nearly enough. A Censuswide UK worker survey showed that 83% of workers did not think their workplaces were doing enough to address climate change. As Forbes highlights,“while 96% of large firms report on their sustainability efforts, the Harvard Business Review reports that these efforts are often more hot air than substance.”
There is a disconnect between awareness and actions
As individuals are becoming more aware and interested in combating climate change, they experience roadblocks on how to act. This happens in their personal lives as well as at work, where they may experience ‘green washing’ from their employers.
There is a growing sea of literature and resources on climate change that can be hard to navigate or not fit for purpose and a serious disconnect between awareness and knowledge versus actions and real change. Even starting with schools, research shows that in the West there is a misalignment and disconnect between the climate change behaviours schools recommend and what research shows is needed.
THE IDEA
The ‘climate change awareness to action’ chain and the one stop shop
We would love to see more companies building solutions at the intersection of education and climate change. Specifically, we are keen to see technology solutions that help individuals and companies go from general awareness to general knowledge to educated action to measurable impact. This could either be solutions that start by addressing specific components of this awareness-to-action chain or, ideally, solutions with visions that integrate the full chain into one end-to-end solution starting with targeted education.
The content: covering small to big actions across personal life, careers and industries
The educational side of the solution cannot just be a generic library of climate change-friendly content. It needs to consider end users and situations, while heavily leveraging what research already tells us about the impact of each behaviour change and decision we make.
For personal use, it should cover practical tips on day-to-day changes (from what and where you shop to cycling to work), medium-term behaviour changes (lowering your heating bills, reducing your meat consumption, flying less) to big picture advice (information about the climate attitudes of your local politicians to inform your voting and give you tools to influence policy).
For business use, solutions could cover everything from finding and hiring the right talent to establish and promote climate-friendly practices, setting up policies and benefits, creating employee incentives and employer accountability to reporting on results taking into account industry-specific needs and circumstances.
Delivery and impact: going from knowledge to actions to results
Content is only the starting point. While a content-alone solution, in a space currently lacking many fit for purpose offerings, could go a long way, solutions that turn the power of content into action and results will go even further.
What this first means is ‘action’ and solutions that empower individuals to use the knowledge and apply it, from influencing your family to cycle, organising a local government initiative to improve a local waste disposal policy to setting up car-pool sharing schemes at work and changing excessive work travel policies.
Lastly, ‘actions’ need to lead to measurable ‘impact’. We are excited about technology infrastructure solutions that cover use cases from helping individuals easily track their monthly carbon footprints to senior leaders being able to demonstrate the genuine, objective impact of their environmental commitment to employees and clients.
WHY IS THIS EXCITING?
Helping ensure our grandchildren have a planet to enjoy
If you believe in climate change and the negative impact of ignorance and inaction, then leaving your grandchildren with a liveable planet ranks pretty high on our ‘educational impact’ scorecard. As with so many major global issues today, including war, lack of education is a root problem and better education and more informed action is the key answer to climate change.
Helping mobilise a lot of goodwill into action and accountability
The rise in awareness and acknowledgement of climate change over the last decade has been incredible. Now is a perfect time to create the foundations and scaffolding to move this awareness into actions and real change. Knowledge is the best tool for accountability when your employers are ‘green washing’ and tech infrastructure is the best way to track and measure progress.
Riding the ESG wave
Beyond climate change, the world is also at an inflection point with the rise in corporate focus on ESG — Environmental, Social and Corporate governance. We need to take advantage of this momentum to ensure the foundations for how we treat the environment are well informed rather than just another act of goodwill with no results.
WHY THIS MIGHT (OR MIGHT NOT) FAIL
Climate change isn’t real?
There are lots of good books and research out there if you are still early on the awareness curve. Worth the time.
Isn’t formal education the key solution?
As with many things to do with formal education, it can be helpful but we know that it is not perfect. There are large inconsistencies in what textbooks recommend are the best actions to counter climate change. Getting more people to study climate change is helpful for furthering science, but many of the behaviour changes needed do not require formal, expensive and lengthy education and research.
Aren’t there already a lot of resources and non-profits dedicated to this?
Yes. The same way there are infinite resources on almost any subject and topic, yet we are not all experts on everything. Content alone is not king. Non-profits are great in raising awareness and an essential part of the solution. We think education technology solutions could play an even more important role.
Isn’t it only really about making three key changes in life?
It’s true that driving and flying less, eating less meat and using less heating and electricity are the 80:20 rule of making a significant reduction in your carbon footprint. Yet we believe reducing reliance on them is a lot more difficult and complex than saying we should stop driving cars, become vegetarian and wear winter jackets at home. Behaviour change takes a lot of time and effort. See the $250bn weight loss market as a parallel example.
Can you really build a unicorn business around climate change alone?
Yes, we think this could be possible and we have written about this extensively under our thesis on the future of workforce development. This sits under solutions we call ‘tailored learning providers’.In the same way companies such as Pluralsight (coding) and Product School (product management) have built big businesses behind specific skills and roles, we believe it could be possible to build big businesses around the knowledge of climate change and skills around sustainability. Sure, your company LMS could have some interesting content on climate change, but we don’t think this is enough to lead to actions and real impact.
Do employers really care and who do I sell this to?
If employees care, we think employers will too. The better educated individuals and employees are, the easier it will be to apply pressure and hold employers accountable against the things they care about and things that matter. While this is something that, in the medium term, could be supported through the L&D budget, in the short term it is more likely to come through employee benefits budgets. We think it could also be pitched directly to ESG-aware and accountable company leadership.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
We would love to hear your thoughts on this piece and topic!
Climate change is a huge problem and we believe a large market of solutions will emerge during this decade. We are specifically excited about its intersection with education and skills. In this piece we describe a general solution with more emphasis on specialised content, but we are excited about a broader spectrum of solutions, worthy of their own future pieces, from challenger universities built around the topics of sustainability (including our portfolio company Tomorrow’s University) to training and staffing businesses that help get more people to work in the clean energy space (including companies such as Greenwork in the US).
Do you agree with this opportunity? Do you think there are other opportunities and risks we haven’t thought about? Do you know someone passionate about this or building a company in this space? Would love to hear from you.
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