Victoria Ransom and Katherine Corich bring a global view to the Pure Advantage green growth campaign.

Internationally successful kiwi entrepreneurs Victoria Ransom and Katherine Corich were today announced as new trustees for Pure Advantage, the business-led green growth organisation. Ransom, the co-founder of social marketing software firm Wildfire, and Sysdoc Group founder Corich reinforce a high-powered group of trustees that includes founder Phillip Mills, Sir Stephen Tindall, Jeremy Moon, Chris Liddell and Geoff Ross, among others.

Chair Rob Morrison says the organisation is excited to have two such prominent New Zealanders join the trustees’ ranks. “Victoria and Katherine bring another important intellectual perspective to Pure Advantage. Their rigour and understanding of the key environmental issues facing New Zealand will add to the research outcomes, and bolster our argument that we need to secure future wealth through embracing the green economy.”

Victoria Ransom has been an entrepreneur since her early 20s. In 2008, she and her now husband Alain Chuard launched Wildfire Interactive, a groundbreaking social media marketing platform. Within a year, they’d taken Wildfire into profit, eventually signing 31 of the world’s top 50 brands as clients. When Google aquired the company for $US450 million in 2012, Victoria became Google’s Director of Product, exiting the company last year to pursue new interests.

A Harvard MBA graduate, she has been recognised by President Obama for her contribution to entrepreneurship, and was included among Fortune Magazine’s “Most Powerful Women” entrepreneurs. Recently, the World Economic Forum named Victoria in its 2015 intake of Young Global Leaders, individuals aged under 40 “who represent the next generation of leadership”.

“I am thrilled to join many of New Zealand’s leading business people on the board of Pure Advantage. To retain its unique position in the world New Zealand must pursue growth strategies that are in harmony with our incredible natural environment. Pure Advantage’s efforts to promote such green growth is essential to New Zealand’s long term success.”

Katherine Corich qualified as a commercial pilot before turning her considerable energy and intellect to becoming an expert in business transformation. Sysdoc Group, the New Zealand-based international business consultancy she founded 30 years ago, now has offices in four countries and a client list that includes the likes of Jaguar Land Rover, National Australia Bank and the Vodafone Group. An Associate Fellow of the University of Oxford – Saïd Business School, with an MA in Linguistics, she has recently been inducted into the NZ Hi-Tech Hall of Fame, was 2015 UK New Zealander of the Year, and has twice won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, among other accolades, while Sysdoc has been recognised for both its carbon reduction efforts and family-friendly workplace policies.

“I’m delighted to be a trustee of Pure Advantage,” she says. “Our beautiful country has so many natural advantages and it’s vital that we protect, enhance and use them sustainably for the greater good. Pure Advantage strives to deliver economic strength for New Zealand in everything from AgriTech, to biodiversity and renewable energy. It’s our chance to get New Zealand on the world stage as a leader in sustainability.”

The enlisting of the two entrepreneurs comes hard on the heels of the release of “Our Forest Future”, a discussion paper prepared for Pure Advantage by Dr David Hall that calls for the planting of 1.3 million hectares of new permanent forest and a national forest strategy. Pure Advantage CEO Simon Millar says both recent developments reaffirm the organisation’s commitment to achieving a greener, wealthier New Zealand. “We were founded in 2011 on the conviction that New Zealand is in a global race for green growth. We cannot afford to slip behind.”