Crossing the valley of death - according to Chevron's Jim Davis

I thought that you might be interested in how Chevron Energy Solutions's president characterizes the role of the Cleantech Open as an innovation catalyst: http://bit.ly/9YCcxw

Enjoy!

Tribute to a giant: Art Rosenfeld, the father of energy efficiency

I had the honor and privilege of meeting Art several years ago at the launch of what was then called the Stanford Institute for the Environment. The launch constituted of several days of fascinating world class presentations and conversations about- you guessed it- the environment and climate change. I have great memories of all the speeches but none as vivid as Art’s presentation. Art had very few slides and the ones he had weren’t very polished. However, his knowledge, passion, style and above all humor were absolutely riveting. Bear in mind that Art was talking about how to make cities more energy efficient… I couldn’t wait to meet him. Which I did after the crowd around him had subsided. He generously spent half an hour with me discussing the economic merits of energy efficiency vs. renewables.

A few years later, I called him at the California Energy Commission to help me launch the then fledgling Clean Tech Open - The mission of the California Clean Tech Open is to encourage the development of clean technology companies that foster a healthy natural environment. Yet again, I was struck by his generosity and kindness. He took the time to understand what we wanted to achieve, provided guidance and made many invaluable introductions at the C-PUC, LBNL and PG&E. He also accepted very graciously to be a keynote speaker at the launch of the Clean Tech Open at San Francisco city hall, on March 21,2006. He has remained a staunch supporter of the Clean Tech Open and I could not thank him enough for his support. Art will once again be the keynote speaker at the Feb 26, 2010 national launch of the competition!

Art received his Ph. D. in Physics under Enrico Fermi and later formed the Center for Building Science at LBNL. He received the Enrico Fermi award in 2006 and co-founded the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. He is stepping down from the California Energy Commission and he will be sorely missed.

Recently I installed a “cool roof” on my own house, an action of which Art is a big proponent. My daughters love our new “cool roof”, as well as, the many other energy efficient design features we are incorporating into our current home renovation. Thanks to people like Art, with his passion, vision and incredible intellect kids today are more inspired and aware of energy use issues than ever before.

Enterprise sustainability in the real world...

FICO is on its way to reduce its carbon footprint by 50% over three years with no incremental budget, only leadership and vision. This Forbes video with Quentin Hardy is a quick exploration into how it all happened!

Searching for the Triple Bottom Line

Fair Isaac owner of the FICO scores has launched a Sustainable Enterprise Initiative whose objective is to reduce the carbon footprint of the company. As the chief marketing officer I have been in an ideal position to support the CIO, Christopher Rence, in his successful efforts to green up Fair Isaac data centers through IT virtualization and leverage of cloud computing.

It is always very re-assuring to see that significant results can be achieved under the right leaderhip!

Social Networks and Water Purification in Buenos Aires

In a previous post (Ultimate Networks, Jan. 8, 2008) I wrote about the role of social networks in B2B environments. Today I’d like to comment on a fascinating Clean Tech application developed by Rebeca Hwang, a friend and Stanford PhD student, as well as the Judging Chair for the California Clean Tech Open (Social Networks, Pizza and Clean Tech, Dec. 14, 2007).

Rebeca’s objective is to use her technical know-how in water treatment technology and her research in quantitative theory of social networks to improve water quality in the slums of Buenos Aires. The water in Buenos Aires’ sprawling slums carries birth-defect-causing nitrates and arsenic in amounts up to 10 times what is considered safe. Because of the lack of government resources, communities have formed water cooperatives to help provide clean water to their constituents. Unfortunately, many of these co-ops are small and not always well managed so water treatment and delivery services lack funding. Moreover, while it is cost-efficient to treat water for 100,000 households, these co-ops have only an average of 2,000 houses each and are therefore rarely profitable.

Rebeca Hwang believes that this considerable challenge can be addressed by applying social networks analysis to map out the relationships between decision-makers at water cooperatives. The idea is that the identification of patterns can pinpoint an organization’s strengths and weaknesses, and in turn, may help that organization to improve its efficiency and effectiveness.
The characterization of the structure of these 480 water cooperatives - servicing 700,000 households - is a massive undertaking. One that requires, through extensive surveys, the tagging of the co-ops by service type and managerial style, both formal and informal. Rebeca is using open-source software programs like Pajek and Ucinet to analyze and convert the raw data into meaningful information. Also, she anticipates that using another program like NetDraw to visualize the intensity of the relationships between the different constituents will reveal some key problem areas. Interviews will complement the study and bring qualitative color to the motivations and approaches of decision makers that may be influencing the various co-op operations but that are not formally represented in their structures.

The expected outcome of this “social network analysis” project is to formulate specific ways to improve the profitability of the cooperatives while increasing the volume of clean water produced.

I believe that innovative approaches, like this one, that leverage existing technologies and apply social network analysis theory can provide a significant boost toward improving people’s daily life while maximizing the use of natural resources. Such project does not require huge investment or new technology. It empowers local communities and enables greater sustainability. Please drop me a line if you know of other interesting clean tech social applications.

Social Networks, Pizza and Clean Tech

I thought I’d share a very successful and personal story about a Clean Tech initiative that epitomizes what Community Marketing is all about: The California Clean Tech Open (www.cacleantech.com). Within its first year of existence the California Clean Tech Open became the richest Clean Tech competition in the nation, was awarded an MIT presidential citation and recognized as one of the 100 best ideas in the New York Times! Now, in its 3rd year the California Clean Tech Open has raised directly more than $2 million in prize (cash and services) and has helped the competition winners raise more than $10 million from the venture community.

It all started back in the fall of 2005 at a conference of the MIT Club of Northern California Clean Tech Program. Several of us had identified a structural vacuum, in the then nascent Clean Tech segment, between entrepreneurs, academics, national labs like Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the venture community. We believed that this vacuum was significantly slowing down the commercialization and adoption of promising clean technologies. So, we decided to create a business plan competition that would act as a catalyst to foster and accelerate innovation. The California Clean Tech Open was born, as a non-profit organization staffed by volunteers. Our motto: By entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs! Our modus operandi: Speed and excellence in execution!

On March 21, 2006, less than five months later, the competition was officially launched at San Francisco City Hall with a keynote address by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, joined by several guests including Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Tom King CEO of PG&E, Dian Grueneich Commissioner California Public Utility Commission, and a representative from the Governor’s office. We announced that we would give a $100,000 “Start-up-in-a-box” prize to the five category winners. The original five categories were: Renewables, Transportation, Energy Efficiency, Smart Power and Water Management, (Green Buildings was added for the 2007 competition).

On Sept 26, 2006, the North Light Court in San Francisco City Hall filled with over 250 attendees to witness the awards ceremony. We were honored to host such national, state, and industry leaders as California Energy Commissioner Art Rosenfeld, National Resource Defense Council Co-Director Ralph Cavanaugh and renowned venture capitalist and biofuels expert Vinod Khosla, Principal and Founder of Khosla Ventures. The 2006 prize sponsors were Agora Foundation, AMD, Lexus, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Sempra Energy and Southern California Edison. Charter partners included A&R Edelman, MIT club of Northern California and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati! This very elite group was joined in 2007 by Google.

It has been by all measures a great success and while we certainly made mistakes along the way, here is what we did right:

1. Identified a significant need where there was pent-up demand
2. Defined a clear mission for the organization
3. Developed a simple strategic plan to ensure maximum speed of execution
4. Articulated a clear value proposition for all constituencies
5. Adapted our plan to reflect feedback
6. Focused on delivering value to the contestants (training, mentoring, feedback sessions)
7. Were absolutely passionate about our mission

More specifically, and from a Marketing standpoint, we focused on getting the word out to the constituencies we wanted to reach. Indeed, getting immediate reach was critical for us as we needed both to generate interest with high-quality sponsors and attract high-level entrepreneurs. Building a targeted social network was job #1. The MIT Club Clean Tech Program created a group on Linkedin, we used Eloqua for mailings and established a Yahoo group for internal communication. And while Job #1 was very much around “push”, job #2 had to be around “pull” if we were to succeed. This meant aggressive PR (thank you A&R Edelman), a website with as many self-service capabilities as possible (registration forms, FAQs, eligibility rules,…), as well as, strong established ecosystem partners like CalCEF, CleanEdge, Greenjobs and the Cleantech Venture Network. We were hoping to reach out to grad students through social media marketing on FaceBook and mySpace but for several reasons had to go more low-tech and hired an outfit to do “postering” on 30+ campuses. This didn’t work out at all! Fortunately, this flop did not prevent the contestants from signing up “en masse”, as we had to review close to 200 business plans in various stages… Our web team did a bang up job and spent many nights de-bugging the application (remember that everybody had a day job). As far as media coverage goes, we must have had a pretty compelling story that resulted in news or bylined articles from KTVU Channel 2, MSNBC, CleanEdge News, Red Herring, ZDNet, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, Motley Fool, local papers like the Palo Alto Weekly and the Almanac, as well as, more long-tail coverage from the New York Times (100 Best Ideas for 2006) and IEEE. Wilson Sonsini very generously helped us organize our summer workshops program (Clean Tech 201 Entrepreneur Series) where very accomplished entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and renowned academics came to assist the entrepreneurs finalize their business plans.

The California Clean Tech Open is a great example of Community Marketing. While passion, talent and dedication amongst the core volunteers is essential, success would not be possible without the enormous good will of the sponsors and partners who continue to generously support this initiative with their time, resources and even more critically with their advice. Yet, despite Linkedin and social media marketing tools, the real magic throughout the process has been the team dinners, that one of us - let’s call him Mickey so as not to embarrass him - keeps throwing with good beer and Amici’s pizzas!