Cherokee Challenge Postponed Until 2015

Cherokee Investment Partners and designer Bill McDonough have been sponsoring an annual Cherokee-McDonough Challenge, in which $20,000 in seed money is awarded to entrepreneurs with ideas for high-impact environmental products and services.

An announcement on the Cherokee-McDonough Challenge web site states that the challenge that was set to run for 2014 has been postponed until 2015. It reads:

“Thank you for your interest in the Cherokee-McDonough Challenge. We have decided to postpone the Challenge until 2015. In the interim, we will be contemplating whether it makes sense to scale the Challenge and how we might go about doing so. If you have questions, comments or ideas about the Challenge you can reach us at [email protected].

And, of course, we are always excited to hear from environmental entrepreneurs, so do not hesitate to reach out if we can be of assistance.”

Cherokee Investment Partners were behind the formation of Industrial Heat LLC last year, which acquired the rights of Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat technology. The postponement of the Challenge makes me wonder whether they feel that there is no need to continue their quest for breakthrough environmental solutions. They mention that they are thinking about ways to ‘scale’ the challenge — I’m not quite sure what they mean by that — but it is an indication that there is some new thinking going on. JT Vaughn, who now manages Industrial Heat, was the organizer of the Challenge — maybe he’s just too busy these days to deal with it this year.