BIZBarcelona - Salón Emprendedor

Opportunities are there. ‘Malgré tout’. Ola Ahlvarsson, serial entrepreneur and chairman of SIME, the event about digital business included in BIZBarcelona, repeated it several times during the morning. First, during his “global journey in digital opportunities” and afterwards during the interviews with marketing experts, investors and serial entrepreneurs, who echoed his words.

“Its a better time than ever to be raising money as a first time entrepreneur”, said Jyri Engström, Founder of Ditto.me. Erik Wikström, founder of Icon Media Lab, Letsbuyit and Result, added that “the biggest thread is not to do anything“. “Act, do something, create a website, talk to people…”, he exclaimed. “Everyone should be an entrepreneur”, he added. “The only way to know if you can do it is doing it”, he concluded. Even when investors insisted on saying that “ideas are not really worth that much” and that the most important is “execution“. And probably because “what motivates you is not making money but making meaning”.

Examples of success are there. Ola Ahlvarsson remind the audience that Facebook has more than 700 million users, that 50 million people have liked the ‘Like’ button, that apps seem to be the universal currency which is changing consumption, that most of the surfaces of your house will be smart, that cloud computing is a challenging phenomenon to the computing industry, that interfaces are more important than games themselves, that language is not an issue anymore, that the innovation model of Apple is Apple and that Google wants to create a ubiquitous media realm…

Does this mean we are going tech crazy? Yes, said Ahlvarsson. “It is going to be crazier than before“.  “Futurists make prophecies, but usually they do not happen”, he winked just before insisting on the fact that “there are more digital opportunities than before” and reminding that “crazy ideas”, such as kingsclub.se, a social network devoted to truck drivers, “work on the Internet”.

Source: investincleantech.net

I was in the seventies and even in the beginning of the twenty-first century. But it is not only related to “alternative”, altruistic environmentalists or lab scientists anymore. Cleantech has eventually entered the financial or business community’s lexicon… Through the front door.

A Google search for the word shows more than 1.5 million results. Among them, a three-part series of San Jose Mercury News from a couple of months ago, highlighting that the sector is poised to be “not just the next big thing but perhaps the biggest thing ever”. Numbers speak by themselves. “Confronting the peril of greenhouse gases and climate change happens to be a multi-trillion-dollar business opportunity”, states the report.

Venture capitalists are in. Investment in the Cleantech Industry grew from $908 million in 2002 to $8.5 billion in 2008 and California garnered 40% of the world’s funding in 2009. It sounds promising. Nevertheless, the Mercury warns that the US is quickly falling behind and underlines that the Silicon Valley’s “ability to innovate its way to the top in cleantech is far from guaranteed”. Competition is fierce and global.

The Mercury shows how China has already overtaken the lead in key markets such as solar, which was led by Spain in 2008, with 2.51 gigawatts installed that year alone, according to a report from the European Photovoltaic Industry Association (EPIA).

On the other hand, a JP Morgan report last year said South Korea is going to be one of the fastest growing solar markets during the next four years. And last but not least: According to the Fundació Fòrum Ambiental, in Catalonia, the sector is still growing 3%-4% despite the crisis. Cards are dealt. HitBarcelona counts with a great bunch of experts to talk about the opportunities in the Cleantech industry. Do you want to join in?