Why We're Going Dutch Next Week
This week we'll welcome hundreds of you to our 7th European Cleantech Forum, our first in the Netherlands, our 30th worldwide.
It seems like a more appropriate time to be in Amsterdam than ever before for several reasons:
1) Cleantech has become a very global phenomenon very quickly. The search for investors, partners, and markets needs to adopt an international perspective from the outset to maximize probabilities of success. Since the 16th century, the Netherlands economy has been closely tied to international trade, and the opening up of new growth markets in the global economy.
2) Cleantech is in need of more capital to accelerate the innovations towards the scale of deployments necessary. The next generation of financial innovations are as much in demand, as technological ones to fully unlock the potential of the world’s growing cleantech portfolio. Financial innovations such as a stock exchange and a pension fund can, in part at least, be traced back to Amsterdam and it could very well be the seat of the next wave of financial innovation needed to scale cleantech.
3) Resource efficiency, not energy generation, is the big innovation theme today. As we enter a generation during which the challenges of food, land and water scarcity will become intense and impactful, we have a lot to learn from the Netherlands where 25% of its land is below sea level and yet they are the world’s third largest exporter of agricultural goods.
More information to be found here: Annual Conference 2011 - Amsterdam
