“There are huge industries which are still ripe for disruption or transformation that really haven’t adopted new technologies in a long, long time.”
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Will Coleman, Partner Mohr Davidow Ventures
The green economy is about applying many of the new tools and approaches that have been used in other sectors to some of the more industrial value chains in the American economy. It is partly about incremental change across massive value chains and partly about disrupting those value chains entirely with new approaches.
What does the future hold for the green economy?
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f course there has been a lot of hype. Much of it was driven by politics and the political desire to have an answer to an ailing economy. The problem is that politics are impatient and there was very little patience for taking the time to let the investment take hold and let companies develop and meet their milestones.
One of the things that was under appreciated by those people who were hyping the green economy is that a lot of these technologies are industrial technologies. To scale them and deploy them means that you’re deploying them across hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars of assets, and deploying those types of assets takes capital and it takes time. Many of these technologies are just beginning to emerge from the start-up stage. There are also a lot of sectors that have just begun to innovate. You look around at some of these sectors and a huge number of very smart people are pouring in looking for solutions. It’s really amazing. In that sense it really does feel like just the beginning. On the other hand, we’ve seen a bit of a capital pull-back in the last 6-12 months and a large part of that—this isn’t new—is just the classic Gartner hype cycle. We’re over the peak of hype and we’re entering the valley of disillusionment. People are beginning to realize that this is hard and that it takes time. And so I think that is what is leading to that sense of ennui that some people are sensing.