The Climate Technology Program's inaugural round-table workshop was held in New Delhi on October 20 and was attended by over 50 leading local and international cleantech innovation experts. Stakeholders from the private sector, government, academic and research institutions, NGOs, incubators and the entrepreneur community. The discussions covered four main themes – technology, finance, collaboration, and entrepreneurship. A special thank you to all of the participants who attended and made the event such a success!

Some key-take aways from the workshop:

• There is the need to coordinate R&D efforts, prioritizing those technologies with the greatest impact and reducing those that are unessential.
• Focus should be made on managing the innovation process, ensuring successful hand-off of technology to entrepreneur to market.
• There is no ready-made pool of entrepreneurs in cleantech and no seasoned mentors, although some insist entrepreneurs exist but you need to find them. A physical location helps attract entrepreneurs.
• A holistic approach needs to be pursued to innovation with centers having both virtual and physical presence. Virtual mechanisms would include governance, collaboration aspects and aggregation; physical include testing facilities, certification services and integration facility.
• Match-making is also critical and technologies need to be paired with entrepreneurs who are qualified through capacity building efforts such as training, internships etc.
• Valley of death financing especially for prototyping is significantly lacking in India. New PPP models for financing need to be developed to bridge commercialization gaps where the risk is too high for private funds to invest alone.
• Many technologies and entrepreneurs are seeking financing for keys (technology solutions) with no lock (market pain-point). Need of advice and support to find market opportunities and link them with technologies to successfully attract funding.