As well as a shake-up of business models as mentioned last week, climate tech solutions often work best when they’re interweaved with other solutions.
This is a way of thinking that businesses won’t always be used to – it’s more collaborative, less competitetive – and the goal is a truly mutual win that benefits lots of people, rather than in individual win that benefits one company.
From a recent McKinsey article, “As these shifts happen, some value chains will break and new ones will form.”
An example is plastic roads mentioned yesterday – plastic recyclers become suppliers to road builders, who become suppliers to installers, who use electric vehicles and machinery to install the roads. When sections of road are damaged and replaced, the damaged section goes back to the original recyclers to start the process again.
Another example is seaweed farming (kelp is highly efficient at carbon-capture). There are a huge number of organisations around the world with bold kelp-growing initiatives – one I’ve spoken to aims to grow a kelp forest the equivalent scale to the Amazon Jungle – but no one of them alone can cover the planet in kelp. So rather than competing to be try and be the one that does, they work side-by-side to grow their pocket of kelp, and collectively cover the planet.
A climate tech solution rarely exists in isolation – if you think about it, that’s true for any solution, but the climate world is acutely aware of this truth and embraces not just as part of the process, but as fundamental to their entire business model.
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