Some grants pay for a single project. The $2 million award the Colcom Foundation made to Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 2006 did something different: it created a tool that would guide conservation decisions for years afterward. That tool is the Conservation Blueprint, a science-based map drawing on 25 years of data from the Pennsylvania Natural…

Anyone considering a partnership, investment, or vendor relationship with a financial technology company has good reason to learn about its leadership. For Priority Technology Holdings, that means looking at its chief executive, who is based in New York and oversees a business founded in 2005. A methodical approach, like vetting Thomas Priore as a fintech…

Ask Greg Soros podcaster what makes a podcast worth listening to, and he will not point to editing software or release schedules. He will talk about the pause before someone answers a hard question, or the laugh that slips out when a guest forgets the microphone is on. Those moments, he says, are the reason…

Much of the science Colcom Foundation cites focuses on biodiversity hotspots, regions with unusually high concentrations of species found nowhere else on Earth. These areas, the organization argues, face outsized pressure from population growth precisely because of how much unique life they hold in a small geographic footprint. Colcom Foundation points to Defries et al.,…

Grit Marketing Builds a Door-to-Door Sales Model That Prioritizes Long-Term Retention A Utah-based direct sales firm is drawing attention for its structured approach to one of the industry’s most persistent challenges: keeping sales representatives productive and engaged beyond their first few months on the job. Grit Marketing, headquartered in Utah, has spent recent years refining…

Few oil and gas companies can point to more than fifty years of continuous operation, but Gulf Coast Western can. Founded in Dallas in 1970, the company has built its joint venture model over five decades, and it now counts more than a thousand investment partners across six states. That longevity is a recurring theme…

A company’s brand portfolio can be its greatest asset or its biggest source of complexity, and Michael Polk faced plenty of the latter when he became chief executive of Newell Rubbermaid in 2011. The company owned a wide assortment of consumer brands that had grown through decades of separate acquisitions, with little connecting them beyond…

How many people can a given region support before it starts to break down. That question, central to the concept of carrying capacity, sits at the heart of a research focus Colcom Foundation funds through its national grantmaking program. Measuring the Limits Colcom Foundation defines carrying capacity as the number of people an environment can…

Chemical recycling has attracted attention because it may provide another route for plastics that cannot be easily handled through conventional mechanical recycling. The opportunity is significant, but so is the commercialisation challenge. Vancouver-based investor Yazan Al Homsi’s interest in Aduro Clean Technologies offers a useful lens for understanding what investors may look for as these…

Inside the Chairman’s Office at Basel Holding. Every organization has a version of its story that gets repeated in press coverage, and for Burak Basel that version keeps circling back to discipline. Burak Basel and its long-term strategy is one of the clearer illustrations of that theme, describing an organization that treats consistency as a…