Business, Government - Written Tuesday, October 20, 2009 by Steve Guengerich - 9 Comments

GreenXchange: “wikinomics” for cleantech intellectual property

I served as a judge for the 3^rd annual Clean Energy Venture Summit (CEVS) in Austin last week. If you’ve never attended one of these events, the main program is a competition among companies vying to win recognition as the best new product or service idea. To compete, each company has one or more representatives do a brief pitch on stage before the judges and, in the CEVS’s case, an audience of over 400 business people, during which they are to make the most compelling case possible for their business.

Each presenter gets the same amount of limited time (5-7 minutes) to cover key points that include: innovation, overall market opportunity, stage of development, intellectual property (IP) position, resource requirements, environmental impact, management team, and potential ROI. After their formal remarks, judges followed by audience members, have another 5 minutes or so to ask follow-up questions.

It’s always interesting to hear over 20 presentations by company principals in such a concentrated period of time. Besides being reminded how important it is to prepare and rehearse a presentation, by listening to a range of styles from very good to universally awful, you also pick up attitudes and perceptions about themes that entrepreneurs and investors consider important and how those change over time.

One of the themes I listened closely for was the approach to IP. Historically, intellectual property – especially patents – has been one of those areas considered to be critical by investors for several reasons, particularly for businesses based on “hard science” like biotech and clean energy.

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