Andreas Kuhlmann, CEO of DENA, joined the speakers of the Forum “EcoInnovations and green entrepreneurship: made in Ukraine” via video conference a week before launching new round of Startup Energy Transition (SET) startup contest. SET is one of the major global competition for energy innovators, that attracted the talents from 86 countries in the previous round. Greencubator is proud to be SET’s local partner in Ukraine for three years.
DENA is Germany’s centre of expertise for energy efficiency, renewable energy sources and intelligent energy systems. As the “Agency for the Applied Energy Transition” it contributes to the attainment of energy and climate policy objectives. We asked Mr. Kuhlmann to share his view on building effective partnerships between business, state regulators and policy for cleantech development. Here is the summary of his key points.
Creating green growth points: Attracting eco innovators on a global scale
Infrastructure excellence: It’s the ecosystem, stupid!
When there is a supportive environment any technology will grow faster and make a greater impact on the whole ecosystem. And green innovations are no exception. To persuade innovators join ecosystem and attract more newcomers, it is vital to demonstrate the benefits of a bigger green complex, including access to resources, communication, ideas sharing, convenient data storage, and so on.
To develop a successful ecosystem, one must take into account all the characteristic features of the existing infrastructure, understand the challenges that face new business models, etc.
There are three necessary emphasises to follow:
- creating,
- promoting,
- capitalizing
for innovators and their cleantech products.
Technology is moving forward, but won’t make it alone
Cleantech industry develops quickly, but nevertheless it needs support: a regulatory accompaniment and sufficient political will for development. As tech innovations appear faster than updates for the regulatory base, it is necessary to cooperate with legislators and advocate quicker regulatory changes. Without proper explanations about the crucial role of green innovations for society, its development is slowing down due to outdated regulation.
Strong political will once given, needs to be (continuously) reconfirmed
To support cleantech changes and its development it is not enough to implement new laws for once — legislative support should continue and constantly make progress. Since politicians have too many issues on the agenda, it’s our task to remind them of cleantech importance and introduce eco innovations to the decision makers. The constantly supportive loyalty of politicians will create better conditions for business development.
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