The Cleantech (Group) Story–So Far
By the end of the stock market downturn of 2002, stocks overall had lost $5T and the Nasdaq-100 had lost 78% in market value since the peak.
The dot-com bubble had well and truly burst; but the role and power of the internet in the world was only just getting started.
It was in that context, in 2002, that our founders coined (and trademarked) the “cleantech” term, bought the cleantech.com URL from a local dry-cleaning business, and founded Cleantech Group.
The thesis then, as it still is today, that:
One of the biggest and most important waves of innovation of the 21st century would give rise to a vast portfolio of technology-driven solutions vying to enable the emergence of a future global industrialized world, one without the emissions and environmental degradation, “unfortunate” by-products of today’s incumbent industrialized technologies our lives depend on.
One of the necessary ingredients in the climate mitigation recipe was the leveraging of human ingenuity and science, to build innovative companies to address these problems.
And so Cleantech Group was born as a market intelligence company, to provide the data, the insights, and the connections to inform, advise and catalyze the expansion of what was then a tiny community of enthusiasts.
The first ever Cleantech Forum event hosted 100 people. Today’s global ecosystem numbers millions. And yet we are still not mainstream.
The first version of our taxonomy had 11 segments (with <500 companies categorized against them). Today it has >1,500 (with >40,000 companies).
A catalyst and ecosystem builder we surely are, but we would not still be here today were it not for the hundreds and thousands of people and organizations who have supported and championed our activities, believing in the North Star and not put off by the inevitable ups and down, bubbles and backlashes.
Too many to mention, but we do wish to recognize those organizations who served on our Advisory Board for 10+ years, some from the start, some from the 2010s onwards.
Companies who spent at least 10 years on such advisory boards have shown their enduring commitment to a resource-efficient future, as others have come and gone. Others have discovered “climatetech” in the 2020s, as though it were something new.
Like us, they are true pioneers and should be recognized as such. Click here for more on them.