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Clean Edge has finished their Report Entitled “Clean Energy Trends 2008″. You can get your pdf copy here.

An excerpt:

Further proof of clean tech’s move from marginalized to mainstream is abundant. A growing number of governments announced plans to generate electricity from renewables. Corporations continued to jump on, if not lead, the race to transition to a cleaner, greener economy. Venture capitalists in the U.S. invested $2.7 billion in the clean-energy sector, representing more than 9 percent of total VC activity. Cleanenergy indices outpaced the broader markets in 2007. For example, the NASDAQ® Clean Edge® U.S. Liquid Series index (co-developed by Clean Edge and NASDAQ) was up 66.67 percent last year, compared with 3.53 percent for the S&P 500 index and 9.81 percent for the NASDAQ Composite index.

According to Clean Edge research:

• Biofuels (global production and wholesale pricing of ethanol and biodiesel) reached $25.4 billion in 2007 and are projected to grow to $81.1 billion by 2017. In 2007 the global biofuels market consisted of more than 13 billion gallons of ethanol and 2 billion gallons of biodiesel production worldwide.
• Wind power (new installation capital costs) is projected to expand from $30.1 billion in 2007 to $83.4 billion in 2017. Last year’s global wind power installations reached a record 20,000 MW, equivalent to 20 large-size 1 GW conventional power plants.
• Solar photovoltaics (including modules, system components, and installation) will grow from a $20.3 billion industry in 2007 to $74 billion by 2017. Annual installations were just shy of 3 GW worldwide, up nearly 500 percent from just four years earlier.
• The fuel cell and distributed hydrogen market will grow from a $1.5 billion industry (primarily for research contracts and demonstration and test units) to $16 billion over the next decade.

Together, we project these four benchmark technologies, which equaled $55.4 billion in 2006 and expanded 40 percent to $77.3 billion in 2007, to grow to $254.5 billion within a decade.

For those of you that might be interested in the wind sector in particular or clean energy in generatl, the latest issue of Renewable Energy World has a couple of great articles worth the read:

• Britannia to rule the waves?: Ambitious for Offshore
• 40,000MW by 2020: Building Offshore Wind in Europe
• Powering China’s Developmen: The Role of Renewable Energy
• A Roundup of News from around the world

Enjoy.

I have a couple of interesting links that people may be interested in.

• My friend forwarded this transcript of a pre-commencement lecture given by Narayana Murthy (chief mentor and chairman of the board, Infosys Technologies) at the New York University (Stern School of Business) on May 9. The theme of the lecture was the great impact that chance events played in shaping his life. Quite a good lecture. It really got me thinking as to the random events that lead to long friendships, family, professional success, and perception altering moments.

• I got a note in my email today with links to 3 new TED Talks.
  • John Doerr: Seeking salvation and profit in greentech
  • Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Photosynth demo on SeaDragon and PhotoSynth (AMAZING)
  • Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: How to help Africa? Do business there

• Also some interesting articles in SmallTimes this month. NanoDynamics is planning an IPO.

• The rankings for the top Schools with Nano programs according to SmallTimes is out. ( or the quick view for the impatient).
• The SmallTimes mergers and acquisitions summary this month seem to have quite a few interesting tid-bits.

  • Xradia with it’s minaturized microscope offerings with some new funding.
    
  • NaturalNano Funding deal is in there (Notice the much improved website with their new money).
  • SolarDiesel with a huge buyout deal on the plans to builds the worlds largest biodiesel plant.
  • Arrowhead Research Corporation continues its end-run to gobble up all the SWNT patents it can find with the purchase of C Sixty Inc. and CNI

• This story from Seth Godin about alignment is concise and to the point.

“When there’s a gap between someone doing her job and doing the right thing, then management has failed.”

The team over at iinnovate.com always surprise me with the quality of their guests for their interviews. This latest interview with Carly Fiorina formerly CEO of HP is no exception.  Min Li Chan and Min Liu ask some very good questions which dig out some great answers and advise from Carly.

Carly gives some really great perspectives in this interview.  Here are a couple of my favorite questions:

When asked asked what element of being a CEO was most challenging at HP she Carly stated:

“The most challenging part about being CEO of HP was that we had to transform the company. It was a great company with a great history, but it was also a company that was lagging further and further behind when I arrived. ….. <stats on missed financials, lack of innovation , etc>… We had a great deal of change that needed to be done, and change is always very difficult.  It [change] is always resisted and particularly difficult with a large, tradition-bound company like HP was.   But that is also frankly the challenge and joy of leadership. Leadership is always about changing things. ….”

When asked how to preserve innovation and a sense of entrepreneurship in corporate America as companies  grow above 10,000 employees mark she stated:

“… So it is a challenge for every company.  The pressure for Corporate America boils down to the fact that the  focus on profitability sometimes causes people to cut costs as opposed to investing in innovation.  This is where leadership is so imporatant.  If the leadership doesn’t decide that innovation is a value worth celebrating then eventually it will whither.   If leadership doesn’t decide that instead of cutting that expense, they will make that investment in the future, then the investments won’t get made…..   I think it is about the culture of a place. Whether risk-taking is really celebrated and rewarded, and if you are going to celebrate and reward risk taking, you have to let people make mistakes.  Not every bet is goign to pay off and you have to deal with that…. There is no silver bullet, but it starts with a believe that innovation is the life-blood of a technology company….”

When asked about the trend of startup aquiring as the major source of innovation for a tech company and whether this was dangerous she replied.

“I think it is a trend which offers some advantaeges to startups…. It is dangerous when taken to extreme…. Every company gets to a place where the old answers don’t work anymore and then the only thing that works is for people to be creative and try new approaches to old problems. If you have outsources all your creativity, all your ability to take risk, all your ability to think about a new idea, then you are not going to be able to solve the problem you need to solve….”

Her talk on how medieval studies (college major) helped her and what a CEO is suppose to do she stated:

“That set of studies, more than anything, taught me how to think…. It [particular class in her major where she was required to read thousands of pages and condense them to 2 pages every week] taught me that to really undestand something you really have to go through all the detail of it, but then to be able to communicate something, to be able to prioritize action around something,  you have to get it down to the essence.   It taught me how you distringuish between the truly important and the merely interesting….”

When asked why she thought that anyone wanting to be a CEO should take on a sales role as some point in their career she stated:

” I think the human dimension of business is really important…. but beyond that, what selling is really about, if it is done well, is talking to people in a language they understand, that is meaningful to them.   If you are going to be successful in selling something to someone else, you have to speak to them in language that is familiar to them and in terms of things that are important to them….. Those are skills that any executive needs to have: How do communicate effectively. How do  speak to people in language they understand.  How tp speak to them in terms that are important to them….”

Interesting insights on some relevent topics to anyone in business. There is much, much more in the interview, well worth the listen.

I ran across this podcast interview with Heidi Roizen of Mobius Venture Capital. Julio from iinnovatecast.com put together some great questions for Heidi ranging in topic from what is web 3.0 going to look like?, how to hire great people?, how to manage your list of contacts and build great relationships?, and how to balance work and life?. Some very interesting discussion on what she sees as chief motivators for employees and what has been most satisfying in her carreer. Her insights on women in technology and VC are great. Heidi offers some interesting perspective as she has lived both sides of the street in that she has been at the reigns of a sucessful startup and now funds those hopefully successful startups. For more insight from Heidi check out this interview over at PodTech.

Guy Kawasaki has a great Post on his website about the book Founders at Work. I’m gonna have to go buy the book now. If you look at the first three sentences on Amazon you get a quick idea of the book contents:

“Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? “

So Guy puts up some of his favorite passages. My favorite one from Guy’s list is:

James Hong (Hot or Not) on his first beta site. “My dad was the first person that ever saw Hot or Not besides Jim and me, and he got addicted to it! Here’s my dad, a 60-year-old retired Chinese guy who, as my father, is supposed to be asexual, and he’s saying, ‘She’s hot. This one’s not hot at all.’”

The first part of the post was also about how Guy draws inspiration from books like this, notice the picture of all his bookmarks. (I am glad to see that others do that with postits)

It is also amazing that some of these people are houshold names now, but at that stage they were just guys with an idea and the passion to make it happen.

Dominic Basulto (formerly of the Business Innovation Insider) has an interesting article on his new Blog Endless Innovation that discusses the concept of the Innovation Capitalist. The Innovation Capitalist as described by Satish Nambisan and Mohanbir Sawhney in their Harvard Business Review Article. I think Dominic really treats the topic well and worth the read.

Nambisan and Sawhney describe the evolution of companies/firms that specialize in a certain application area or markets and develop unfit or fuzzy conepts into products. So Innovation capitalists take the place of a companies Product development, or for at least the front part of it. The innovation capitalist would specialize in taking a raw product concept and developing it to the point where a company would be willing to purchase the idea.  So they would prototype, verify market space, develop a plan for manufacturability, build a cost model, etc.  By specializing in one particular sub-segment, they can be more efficient than some large firms.  It seems to me like Innovation capitalists are like startup owners, but their currency is the idea.   

As I was reading his article and the HBR article the many different idea intermediaries really started to fall into place: Product Scouts, Patent Brokers, Sole inventors, Startup firms, Electronic R&D marketplaces, innovation capitalists, and venture or private equity. This whole concept of an ideas ecosystem/economy seem more solid. Are ideas an exchange medium or tradable commodity? or is this just a interesting label for a consulting service?   Could one buy and sell ideas much like one purchases intellectual property now?   Should they be traded or licensed like patents?   Should one account for them when they list their assets?

I was discussing with some of friends the other day about LinkedIn.com. They were all asking questions like:

1. Why should I join this?
2. How would one use it?
3. Why not use use Friendster or MySpace?
4. What would I put in myprofile?
5. How do I get my friends to join?
6. Who do I invite?

So in order of convenience, I’ll try to put some of the better answers that I have seen.

1. Why should I join this?
2. How would one use this?

I think Guy Kawasaki has a pretty good summary of why in the first part and how in the second part of the post on his weblog entitled “Ten ways to use Linkedin”. He really hits on most the major ones that I have heard in other places. Personally, I started using this as a way to keep track of my friends and colleagues as they have scattered the world, changed jobs, or other things that make it difficult to keep tabs on them. I also like the 11th entry on the new questions and answer feature of linkedin. Reid Hoffman (One of LinkedIN’s founders and formerly of Paypal fame) also has some insight into how LinkedIN was originally envisioned and how it is used now in this interview on Venture Voice.

As for #3 Why not use use Friendster or MySpace?

Well this is one is a little subtle and very important. MySpace and Friendster are for social functions. People looking for, finding, and socializing with with others. Linkedin in my mind is a very different beast in that it is targeted at professionals. Most professionals “have enough friends” to paraphrase Konstantin Guericke one of linkedin’s founders stated in this interesting interview on Dan Keldsen’s website. He then goes on to talk about the distinction between people who want social interaction and people looking for business contacts, relationships, jobs, and information. Most people are not just looking to hang out and most people don’t want you to waste their time doing so. For me the concept of seeing who my friend’s friends are and how we could help each other is quite fascinating.

As for #4 What would I put in myprofile?

I start out by saying “what is your intent?” Are you looking for a job? Looking to stay in contact with friends? Wanting to expand you network size for business leads or influence? Are you looking for potential customers? investors? or potential hires?

Personally you can check out my evolving profile by clicking in the link in the sidebar of this blog. I think we can look to Guy Kawasaki again for a nice post about his Linkedin profile before and after he went about improving it. I would look around and see how other people use it. I see improvements people have made all the time.

As for #5 How do I get my friends to join?

You are pretty much on your own on this one. I find that people interested in trying new things are much more likely to give it a shot and sign up. There are a couple of other tips:

• Send a personalized email - Don’t just send a form mail.
• Include the Sig you usually use when emailing them so they recognize it.
• Be interesting. People that you I find interesting or that find me interesting usually accept every time.
• Send a separate email or phone conversation to them outlining why you sent them the link, explaining linkedin, and links to some interesting articles about it.

As for # 6 Who do I invite?

Well I use pretty much one criteria for selecting who to invite. If I find the person interesting, I send them an invite. Someone I am not impressed by or wouldn’t want to recommend to my friends doesn’t make the cut. This is my policy, but again if you have other reasons for using linkedin like expanding your network, gathering information, or hiring people, you can pretty much invite every email address you come across.

Well I hope this is helpful to those of you that might have had questions like this. Let me know if you have other suggestions.