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:
“Looking forward to 2024, alternative proteins will likely continue to attract a substantial share of Agriculture & Food funding. However, expect more of that capital to go to B2B players making ingredients, consumables, or infrastructure for alternative protein production…”
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:
“With $18.2B of venture capital into [Energy & Power] technologies, 2023 saw the second highest year in terms of investments since Cleantech Group started recording this data.”
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:
“2023 saw strong development in the deployment of green steel production technologies. Leading the way is the production of hydrogen direct reduced iron which will add to demand for renewable energy and green hydrogen technologies.”
Ian Hayton, Group Lead
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
“2023 saw an uptick in investment across the critical materials supply chain, with technologies such as direct lithium extraction (DLE) and battery recycling seeing more market traction, while regulatory pressures and high-water risks drove investment into wastewater management and treatment technologies.”
Holly Stower, Group Lead
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:
“As the energy demand increases from newly electrified fleets, commercial vehicles such as transit buses and heavy-duty freight vehicles, charging and energy management solutions will be critical to stabilize grids, allow utilities to meet consumer power demands, and avoid extensive grid upgrades.”
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
“2023 saw a downturn in deal amount back to pre-2021 levels — whilst deal number remained relatively static.”
Holly Stower, Group Lead