Sustainability
Maximum: economic, environmental and social. A solution that does not sustain itself changes nothing.
The manifesto
Empowering Innovation.
We say it like that, untranslated, because it has a double meaning that Spanish would lose. This page is the full answer to why we exist, how we are organised, and what our name really means.
The demonstration, with data and sources: why water, food and energy.
7 min read
1
We empower innovation
The first of the two senses. Making the very process of innovating faster, safer and more effective: the venture builder, the methodology of the thirteen-phase path, an AI engine where the machines generate and the people decide.
Volcano is born of twenty years spent on the wrong side of the Cassandra effect: proposing before the time and not being believed. And of a conviction that story teaches: what innovation lacks is neither ideas nor money: it is the system that connects knowledge, capital, industry and relationships. The full story is in the founding essay; the system, in the extended theory of capital.
2
We create innovation that gives power to people
The second sense, and it is the one that really matters. Solutions that give individuals and communities back control over essential resources, instead of concentrating it.
They are not two sentences. It is a single idea, said twice from different angles.
The problem
We are living through a polycrisis. Innovation has become concentrated in few hands.
Climate emergency, inequality, geopolitical tensions. And yet the force most able to change all this (innovation) has become concentrated in few hands, rewarding speculative value over real benefit. Less innovation is not what is needed. A different innovation is: one that aligns private and collective interest instead of setting them against each other.
The bet on the unknown, in two stories
When the Spanish Crown funded Columbus's voyage it bought, without knowing it, the most profitable asset in its history: every euro invested in that expedition has returned, measured to today, of the order of millions of times its value. Five centuries later, mining the first million bitcoins cost some 120,000 dollars. Neither figure is a venture return or a promise: they are reminders that betting on what does not yet exist is, historically, what has moved the frontier of value most. And that almost nobody recognises it when it passes in front of them.
The choice
We choose big problems, and solutions that break.
Not all problems are worth the same. The bigger the problem a solution solves, the better rewarded that solution is: that is why we do not look for improvements, we look for the problems a sector has taken as inevitable.
And there are two ways of solving them. Incremental innovation improves what already exists: modest multiples are more reachable, but the reward is capped and competition arrives soon. Disruptive innovation does something else: it concentrates the value in few winners, and it leaves whoever arrives first a margin for far longer, because nobody is competing for the same ground yet. Volcano prefers the second, and there is the name: a volcano does not improve the landscape, it creates a new one.
Within that criterion there is a second filter: we prefer projects with the highest sustainability indices across their three pillars, environmental, social and economic. Not as a reputational add-on, but for the same economic reason: a solution that sustains all three has a market for longer.
And within that filter there is a declared priority: the solutions that give back to people, communities or countries their water, food and energy security. They are the problems whose scale and urgency grow with the polycrisis described above.
The criterion by which we look at a project before anything else is the same one an investor uses to value it: market, idea and team. It is not ours, and they do not weigh the same.
The commitments
When we innovate, we do so with four commitments that are not optional.
Accessibility
A solution counts only if it really reaches people, not only whoever can afford it.
Resilience
Built from below, from individuals and communities able to withstand the blows.
Decentralisation
Shifting power from the few to the many, through autonomous but collaborative networks.
How we are organised
We are not a company. We are a manifesto.
Volcano is a network of independent companies in Europe and around the world. Each has its own name, its own headquarters and its own legal personality, and all decide to operate under the same set of rules because they share this purpose. The Canary Islands are not our only home: they are the node that coordinates the network legally and operationally, the place where it all began and where we always return.
Who joins
Not everyone fits into this network.
The companies that join Volcano share one same character, even before one same sector: they know how to work as a team, not alone, because individual ego does not build networks, mutual trust does. They share the spirit of research and development: the curiosity to look for new solutions, sometimes incredible ones, where others settle for the already known. And above all they share one same tension towards the limit: they are not companies that ask whether something is possible, but how to make it possible.
The future we stand for
Technology, well directed, is wellbeing for everyone.
We are optimists by method, not out of naivety: every project in the portfolio exists to solve a real problem, and every startup that reaches the market leaves behind skilled employment, protected knowledge and prosperity that stays in the territory. Technological development is not an end in itself: it is the most powerful lever we know for widening everyone's wellbeing. That is why there are three good reasons to come in, and all three hold.
Financial value
The investor's double return and the startup's growth: prosperity is measured too.
Social value
Real problems solved and skilled employment in the Canary Islands: innovation that gives power to people.
The pleasure of creating
Building something unique and new is a motive in itself: the mind that sees that value achieves what looked impossible.
Beauty
We are also, sometimes, a laboratory of art.
Not everything we build is technology. On some projects, Volcano works as a laboratory of art: pieces, objects and experiences whose first value is not functional. We do it because beauty is for us an essential dimension, a language we do not know how to give up: few things are as bound to human experience as the beautiful, and a network that exists to widen wellbeing cannot treat it as an ornament.
When a product is beautiful, it tells the truth about the care with which it was made. When a place is beautiful, it changes whoever lives in it. That is why patents and works coexist in our portfolio: they are two ways of the same thing, creating something unique and new that did not exist before.
Why Volcano
The name says it all, if you know how to read it.
Land born of the volcano
The Canary Islands, literally emerged from the sea.
Like magma
Resources accumulate in silence before erupting and creating value where there was none.
Thought solidifies
Fluid below, concrete form above: solutions, products, a company. Layer upon layer, the way an island is built.
Creative force
The volcano has always been the image of energy that transforms.
«Un vulcano la mia mente incomincia a diventar.»
There is a precise image that sums up the symbolic side of the name: Figaro in The Barber of Seville, who at the promise of gold sings that his mind is beginning to turn into a volcano. Capital, in the right mind, does not stay inert. It ignites.
«We have so radically altered our environment that we must now alter ourselves in order to exist in it.»
This is what we offer whoever joins this network.
Not a services contract, but a place where capital (of knowledge or financial) turns into something that matters. And this is what we ask in return: the same rules, the same purpose, the same way of measuring success.
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
John F. Kennedy, 1962
John F. Kennedy, 1962