Author: Richard Youngman

Optimization is now a Problem: Reflection 2 from Cleantech Forum Europe

Richard Youngman
Posted on by Richard Youngman
The second takeaway I had from our recent 15th annual Cleantech Forum Europe in Stockholm concerned incumbency – but from a different angle than usual. Typically, we think about incumbency from the point of view of incumbent products, incumbent firms or incumbent technologies. Less do we think about an incumbent mentality. But it is the incumbent business mentality of optimization which is at the heart of this realization: we are geared up for optimization, and optimization in turn looks set to... Read More »

There is No Them, We are All Them: Reflection 1 from Cleantech Forum Europe

Richard Youngman
Posted on by Richard Youngman
One message struck home hard to me last week at our 15th annual Cleantech Forum Europe, back in Stockholm this year for the second time. It came to me in a number of forms across the event, but it was striking for how it kept reappearing, whether I was in a private, off-the-record discussion session with 20 investors, in plenary listening to the key findings of the Exponential Climate Action Roadmap or in topic-specific breakout sessions (for example, listening to... Read More »

Whisper it Quietly, but European Cleantech Is Capturing Discerning Global Attention

Richard Youngman
Posted on by Richard Youngman
European cleantech is in rude health. But if you're looking at the global news flow and its inevitable attention on the biggest ticket items and the hottest (over-hyped?) segments of the global industrial portfolio, you might conclude not so much is happening in Europe. You’d be wrong. In its typically understated way, the European innovation ecosystem is quietly thriving, dealflow is strong, technological excellence is to the fore, available funds for investment are increasing and there has been a strong... Read More »

Does Shell’s Acquisition of Sonnen Represent our Netscape Moment?

Richard Youngman
Posted on by Richard Youngman
There were milestones on the internet’s journey to becoming what it is today, namely an all-pervasive, essential and normal part of consumer, business and now, with the rise of IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things), industrial life. In the 1980s and early 1990s, it wasn’t clear-cut that the Internet would become mainstream. Netscape was a critical part of changing that. A web browser company, it brought the power of the Internet to millions and was able to IPO in 1995 with... Read More »

Echoes From the Past: Companies and Themes to Pay Attention to Beyond the APAC 25

Richard Youngman
Posted on by Richard Youngman
Maybe you have been following us closely enough to notice that we have been making a stronger push into the B2B future of industrial innovation ecosystem in Asia over the last year? This initial push will culminate with AsiaConnect week, in which we will host our 1st Cleantech Forum Asia in Singapore on November 13-14, 2018, followed by our invite only Next-Gen Energy & Cross-Border Innovation Summit in Nanjing, China on November 15-16, 2018. Maybe you noticed that, two weeks ago,... Read More »

Mobility, Intelligence, Scooters, Reverse Innovation, and More – Our APAC 25 provides us glimpses of the future

Richard Youngman
Posted on by Richard Youngman
We released our APAC 25 today, representing 25 leading innovative companies from across the region and across the different industrial spheres. The APAC 25 is a new sister list of the Global Cleantech 100 program that we are releasing ahead of our 1st Cleantech Forum Asia in Singapore on November 13-14, 2018. No doubt, just as will always be the case with our flagship Global Cleantech 100 program, the final list of companies would not be any one person’s list... Read More »

Just two of us? Or is anyone else noticing the innovation and venturing news coming from Southeast Asia, of late?

Richard Youngman
Posted on by Richard Youngman
We are a firm believer in the idea that innovation, year on year, is going global, measured by where innovative solutions are emerging from, where demand for them resides, and who is providing the capital for the next-generation of new businesses, transitioning us toward a very different 21st century. Recent years have seen a venture capital industry boom in China, we have seen Slush in Finland becoming one of the biggest tech/innovation conferences in the world (20K people, >2,000 startups,... Read More »

Keep Calm and Carry On: A very British response to Trump’s withdrawal?

Richard Youngman
Posted on by Richard Youngman
When President Trump was elected last November, and again when he was inaugurated in January, I found lots of people wondering and asking out loud how detrimental would this seemingly anti-climate change, pro-fossil fuel President be to the more positive momentum the sustainable innovation world has been feeling of late. Such momentum was built on improving economics and market dynamics for the solution set, built on improving technology and lessons learned from the “gold rush” mentality of cleantech 1.0. The... Read More »

Charting the Future Towards 2032: Why affordable technology can trump the future

Richard Youngman
Posted on by Richard Youngman
Charting the Future Towards 2032 was the theme of our recent 15th Cleantech Forum San Francisco. Some focus was given to the idea of imagining out how things might develop over the next 15 years given our 2017 starting point, itself a result of where the last 15 years has taken us. This three-part blog series was intended to provide some perspectives to help you get set for the year and the years ahead, drawing on my own keynote at... Read More »

Breakthroughs: Just what does it take to make it?

Richard Youngman
Posted on by Richard Youngman
Last week , we were both very surprised and disappointed to hear the news that Aquion Energy, the US battery company who ranked top in our Global Cleantech 100 Expert Panel’s summer assessments, was forced to voluntarily file for chapter 11 to provide the breathing-room to allow it to find a buyer who could take the impressive achievements of the last few years and provide the capital to scale up the manufacturing to finish the job of getting a breakthrough... Read More »