How to green our region's innovation network

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David Kenney is president and executive director of the Oregon Built Environment and Sustainable Technologies Center known as Oregon BEST.

As co-awardees of the first federal EDA i6 Challenge grant focused on accelerating technology commercialization, we at Oregon BEST have been reflecting on our region's resources for entrepreneurs in the built environment and sustainable technologies sectors. What we've come to recognize is that while our region has a strong set of resources for commercialization, the expertise has largely come from the IT and software sectors, making for a sometimes awkward translation to cleantech.

To radically improve our state's success at turning our strengths in green building and renewable energy into innovative new products and services, we need to improve the support services for these unique cleantech sectors. We need to provide information and training to our regional angel investors to make them more comfortable stepping into unfamiliar territory. We'll be talking about this at the Oregon BEST FEST ’11 on September 12th in Portland, where we hope entrepreneurs, business leaders, angel investors, government agency staff and university researchers will participate in collaborative brainstorming about how best to accelerate commercialization within Oregon's cleantech sector.

So what makes clean technology different? Here are the three areas I see the most significant differences between high tech and cleantech from an entrepreneurship and investment perspective: