Background

In 2019, 3HE founder Andrew Crosby began interacting with hundreds of regenerative development practitioners and creatives as part of the stewardship team of the newly launched Global Regenerative CoLab (GRC), a collective undertaking to catalyze regenerative innovation.

Hosting a weekly meeting called the Regenerative Insights Circle, connecting actors from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas, he was struck by the continued challenging gaps in information flow and knowledge transmission between innovators within and across disciplines; and the resulting inability to connect to funders and investment markets. These were familiar and inspiring challenges from his previous work in building public purpose ventures.

Exploration for Third Horizon Earth began in late 2020. With the individual and collective contributions of Advisory Board members and many others.

We realized that innovation in the context of regenerative development—in systems—and across dimensions is fundamentally different than in the mainstream economy of products and services. Third Horizon Earth came about in reference to a framework that was introduced in the 1990s by partners at McKinsey as a framework for innovation. The Three Horizons model—including the Third Horizon where the seeds of tomorrow’s systems are cultivated—has been adopted by regenerative development pioneers seeking to bend mainstream practices toward innovative holistic solutions. They are re-defining and re-designing successful economies as dynamic relationships of social and environmental synergies within complex, interdependent systems.

This concept of the Three Horizons both in its framing and its aspirations fits with where many of today’s regenerative pioneers are operating. Moreover, it fits with modern innovation portfolio theory. 3HE seeks convergence between today’s systems and the amazing innovation we see in the regenerative development movement that pulls us forward to the Third Horizon.