Green Entrepreneurship
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Andrew Hargadon has established the Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy to address the many challenges that green engineering and entrepreneurship face.
Intellectual and financial capital both contribute to developing green technologies and launching new businesses. Valuable new green efforts are at risk because the nature of entrepreneurship in these ventures – clean energy, water quality, climate change, and environmental protection and remediation – is fundamentally different from the same activities in the days of the semiconductor, PC, and Internet sectors.
Unlike Silicon Valley’s “recipe for revolution” – where technological innovation funded by experienced entrepreneurs and investors created new markets – green entrepreneurship typically focuses on revolutionizing brownfield industries and markets. Brownfield markets, such as energy and transportation, are characterized by existing incumbent competitors and customers, deep-rooted business relationships, and the regulated nature of the markets. To be effective, sustainable solutions to brownfield problems must chart a different course than the Silicon Valley revolutionaries.
First, green entrepreneurs must find solutions that address the existing social, political, and operational realities as much as they exploit emerging technical possibilities. Energy and transportation are long-standing industries, and any attempted change threatens equally long-standing livelihoods and allies.
Second, green entrepreneurs must find innovative ways to recombine existing technologies and business networks. The sheer scale of established industries such as energy makes interruptions in ongoing operations extremely costly; oftentimes, unproven technologies or new ventures present too great a risk. Green entrepreneurship requires scalable and reliable innovation.
Finally, green entrepreneurs must adapt to the regulatory environment that currently defines these established markets. In heavily regulated industries, profits are driven as much by established and upcoming regulation as by growth or operational efficiencies.
The rules that worked in the Silicon Valley do not work in the brownfield industries that need change. Without new models for green entrepreneurship, the efforts of entrepreneurs and investors fall short of bringing real change.
– Andrew Hargadon
Andrew Hargadon is the director of the UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship and author of How Breakthroughs Happen. He is also presenting the NIWeek 2008 conference guest keynote.
Download a resource kit about sustainable design practices being implemented with NI products.
This article first appeared in the Q3 2008 issue of Instrumentation Newsletter.
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