Consulting
Climate change is already here and it’s altering the world at an alarming rate. Our consulting services will provide leaders with insight to de-risk the future and seize opportunities.
We help clients identify, prioritize and develop opportunities for sustainable growth, leveraging external innovation for measurable impact in a changing climate.
We are problem solvers, drawing on research, our extensive network, and insight, to work with you to frame challenges and develop actionable solutions. We are continually curious, bringing our depth of experience to every engagement.
Who We Serve
corporations
Innovation, Strategy, Corporate Sustainability Teams, Business Development, and Business Unit Leadership
Governments
Cities/Regional/National
Economic Growth, National Innovation Agencies and Relevant Ministries, and Economic Development Teams from Cities and Regional Administrations
NGO's
Climate, Sustainability, Innovation Leaders
Types of Engagement
Engaging External Innovation
There are many ways organization can engage external innovation: from being a limited partner (LP) in a fund aligned with your goals to building a dedicated team.
1
The first step is defining your objectives and ability to engage.
- How can external innovation help your organization address unmet needs, expand into adjacent activities, or grow into new opportunities?
- Is your organization ready with resources, processes, and internal alignment?
2
The second step is to develop a landscape that is relevant to your organization.
- What is the value chain, who are stakeholders, sources of innovation, demand for innovation and examples of innovators in each of the business activities? This will lead to a hypothesis of how to engage.
3
The third step is to validate the hypothesis by engaging the innovators and ecosystem stakeholders by learning through conversations, revising your hypothesis and priorities.
- This will lead a roadmap for engagement.
4
The fourth step is for the organization to execute the roadmap. Depending on organization resources, this may be done directly by the client or with varying degrees of support from the Cleantech Group team.
Pilots for Impact
Corporates with sustainability goals have often started to address the “low hanging fruit” to meet their objectives, and then find there are unmet needs at multiple levels — Unmet needs that may only be met with external innovation.
Innovators need hands-on experience engaging with corporates, to learn what will be critical to demand owners in scaling from pilot to commercial scale. There are many challenges, competitions and awards competing for innovator’s participation – most of these do not provide access to a funded pilot within a corporation, collaborating directly with the people who can provide critical feedback, results, and insight into scaling up.
Cleantech Group works with corporates who are interested in developing programs that identify unmet needs, quantify the impact of addressing these needs, and are open to engaging innovators with relevant solutions through funded pilots.
We work with organizations and business units to design the unmet need, understand the impact of the need, the pilot, and scale up. We then recruit targeted innovators to help them understand the need and define their value and requirements to a pilot.
Working with the client, we prioritize and select the innovators for the pilot, define the KPI’s and workplan and bridge the gap between the innovator’s approach and the corporate’s business.
Ecosystem Building
Cleantech start-ups face specific challenges as they scale, from long times to market, needs for testing equipment and demonstration opportunities, access to finance, talent, and the need to compete with lower-priced, higher polluting incumbent technologies.
Effective cleantech ecosystems support start-ups to overcome these challenges, creating the conditions to bring more cleantech innovation to market and to scale it faster. The result is economic growth as well as climate impact.
We work with cities, regional administrations, national governments and NGOs, and multilateral organizations to create the macro conditions for cleantech innovation to thrive.
Rapid assessment is an ‘outside looking in’ evaluation of the strengths and opportunities. This starting point overview helps you identify promising topics for deep dives, and high impact opportunities to leverage cleantech innovation for climate impact and economic growth.
We develop ecosystem strategies and roadmaps at the city, regional, or national level. We conduct rigorous primary research for insight into how the ecosystem, roles, services, funding, strategies, and participation are evolving with an eye toward the future. We will make recommendations to align innovation strengths and objectives with long-term regional and global demand trends. We will then work with you to prioritize interventions for development, capacity building, policy, and public support mechanisms to ensure resources are allocated for the highest impact.
Our cluster building approach takes clusters at any stage to the next level. We work with key ecosystem stakeholders in emerging and developing clusters to define vision, value proposition, organizational models. and a plan to sustainability. We develop sophisticated multi-stakeholder strategies to turn mature clusters into high-growth innovation ecosystems.
Stakeholder engagement is an important part of each stage of the process. We’ll support you to identify and align key stakeholders through high quality, targeted content and activities that create a shared vision and unite stakeholders behind a common cause. This may take the shape of targeted communication, working group mobilization and operation, organization and running of roundtables, panels, presentations, or other public and closed-door events.
Industry Groups
We research these industry groups and their cross-cutting underlying enabling technologies with a focus on sustainable innovation:
Technologies and services that make the production of food more efficient and effective
Read the Latest Blogs in Agriculture & Food
See the Innovators Leading the Way in Agriculture & Food:
“There’s a funding winter in agri-food. But the future looks promising as investors connect the dots between biotech, automation, and climate adaptation…”
Jack Ellis, Senior Associate
Technologies, services and business models that accelerate the transition to renewable energy and optimize existing processes.
Read the Latest Blogs in Energy & Power
See the Innovators Leading the Way in Energy & Power:
“Macro uncertainty weighs on venture investments, but growing energy demands from data centers have created opportunities for early stage technologies including nuclear solutions which saw significant growth this year.”
Selene Law, Senior Associate & Zainab Gilani, Associate
Innovations which enable the efficient production of basic materials such steel, cement, and chemicals, or advanced materials used in other cleantech sectors
Read the Latest Blogs in Materials & Chemicals
See the Innovators Leading the Way in Materials & Chemicals:
“The overall trend in the Materials & Chemicals industry group reflects positive upward growth, despite some sectors experiencing reduced funding this year, including advanced energy materials and specialty chemicals.”
Buff Lopez, Associate
Technologies and services to protect and restore natural environments, sustainably source materials, prevent waste, improve the circularity of materials, adapt to climate change, and assess corporate environmental impact, carbon, and offset markets
Read the Latest Blogs in Resources & Environmental Management
See the Innovators Leading the Way in Resources & Environmental Management
“In 2024, the landscape for water technology for Resources & Environmental Management looked decidedly different from years past as the Cleantech Group taxonomy has since been split and the new focus of Resources and Environmental Management is exclusively on potable water, digital water technologies, and purification solutions.”
Alex Crutchfield, Associate
Vehicles, technologies and services that move people and goods with zero or low emissions, or in a more resource-efficient way
Read the Latest Blogs in Transportation & Logistics
See the Innovators Leading the Way in Transportation & Logistics:
“The Cleantech Group taxonomy has become more discerning with micromobility innovators, excluding innovators such as ridesharing or leasing companies without clear IP either in vehicle components, design, or fleet management solutions.”
Nicole Cerulli, Associate
Technologies to manage waste in an environmentally sound manor, compared to traditional methods
Read the Latest Blogs in Waste & Recycling
See the Innovators Leading the Way in Waste & Recycling
“Plastic recycling had a bounce-back year in many ways. After a 75% decline in venture investment from 2022 to 2023, new innovations in advanced recycling technologies (solvent dissolution, depolymerization, and pyrolysis) have improved recycling efficiency and won back investors’ interest.”
Parker Bovée, Associate