Peter Corbyn
GreenNexxus

Technology and protecting the environment are two topics that will define our time in history.   One of the current strategies of environmental sustainability is a corporate driven focus to encourage individual employees to act green.  Peter Corbyn, Co-founder and Chief GreenNexxian with New Brunswick’s GreenNexxus could see it coming and is building his business to help it along.

Several years ago Peter was a force behind Canada’s “One Million Acts of Green” campaign.  Inspired by its success and recognizing the capacities of corporate engagement, GreenNexxus set out to develop and sell customized sustainability software for corporate clients that would encourage, promote and measure ‘green acts’ of employees.   GreenNexxus software can be customized for each client in terms of look, calibre of ‘green’ from simple to more complex, and whether its display is private, internal, or on the world wide web.

All would agree that the idea is great, good and sound.  Peter says, “GRI – the Netherlands-based Global Reporting Initiative whose mission it is to make sustainability reporting standard practice by providing guidance and support to organizations – is helping make a priority of sustainable business practice.   In practice, recent research from Fortune 500 companies show that sustainability stories are no more than one mouse click away.   Clearly, companies are becoming more conscious of sustainability in general both from the global perspective and as a means of reducing cost.” 

The challenge that Peter and the GreenNexxus team brought to EF was how to make it a sustainable revenue-generating business.   His Advisory Session helped drive him to the answers.  He says, “Advisors asked hard questions - a bit like Dragon’s Den.  The different perspectives were invaluable – some had expertise on webspace, some challenged the revenue model component, some helped connect the dots for government funding.  We talked about sales strategy in context of getting the message out and leverage points.  As a result of the session, we’ve changed the way we manage the sales model.”

GreenNexxus is on a strong track.  Peter says, “Those who have seen the product, like it, and engage.”   Now in the final stages of development, the product already has several major corporate clients, and became commercially available early in 2011.