Saint-Gobain Offers Start-Up Opportunity
Saint-Gobain, the world’s largest building materials company with business sectors in construction products, innovative materials, and building distribution, has a terrific opportunity for entrepreneurs: win a chance to pitch your innovative business to Saint-Gobain’s senior leadership team! Saint-Gobain’s NOVA External Venturing business unit is dedicated to developing strategic partnerships with start-up companies worldwide, and they’re...
The Entrepreneur: A Masterpiece of Dexterity, Grace and Risk
Bilal Zuberi led the 2012 University Research & Entrepreneurship Symposium (URES, pronounced by those in the know as U-Rez) breakout session titled “Resourceful Entrepreneurs.” An innocent title, it called up images of a boy scout with a good Swiss army knife and a set of dry matches, but what followed seemed more like instructions on...
Good Licensing Practices are Critical to our Economy
Entrepreneurship built this country. Small business create 64% of new jobs, hire 40% of all tech workers, and produce 13 times more patents per employee than large businesses. Moreover, every large business began as a small one, and many small businesses spun out of universities orgovernment labs.
Innovation: The Key to Unlocking America’s (Clean Tech) Potential
Innovation is when Invention solves a Problem (ideally at sufficient scale to create a sustainable and high impact solution).
U.S. Clean Tech Industry At A Crossroads
In digesting the important questions that Mitch Tyson outlined in the Energy Leaders Forum’s first post, it struck me that these questions represent a collection of the (mostly) non-technical barriers to the success of the clean tech sector, and define the obstacles we must overcome as we face two possible futures: One leads to rapidly...
The Cleantech Revolution Will Not Be Televised
There's a shakeout underway in the cleantech venture sector, with many generalists abandoning dealmaking in cleantech to head for "easier" returns in social media, and many sectoral specialists having a hard time raising new funds. But there's a revolution underway in cleantech, and it's being led by the entrepreneurs.
Nurturing Cleantech Startup Clusters
If the U.S. is going to be a cleantech world leader, cleantech clusters need to be effective innovation engines, connecting and accelerating the lab to market cycle. But what does support to entrepreneurship and innovation actually look like?
Lessons for Clean Energy Entrepreneurs
Last month I was honored to have the opportunity to share some “lessons learned” at the Leading Clean Energy Ventures Executive Certificate program, a partnership between the Clean Energy Council and Boston University School of Management: Be selective in which investors you pitch; and if you don't like government, don't play in the energy sector....
Training Clean Energy Capitalists
Our region—and the greater Boston area in particular—is the home for world-leading research institutions and has no shortage of talented, experienced entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. The trick is helping these successful innovators transition from sectors like IT or biotech into clean energy.