Makower: Businesses move into leadership role in cleantech

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Joel Makower sees businesses playing a leadership role in the transition to a clean economy.

Joel Makower is among Silicon Valley's go-to advisers for sustainability and the clean energy economy. His GreenBiz.com website and related businesses have grown to 16 full-time employees and a roster of events that spans the globe.

In Portland over the weekend to keynote at the Muddy Boot Festival, Makower sat down with Sustainable Business Oregon to talk about trends in business sustainability and the clean energy economy.

Makower sees sustainability evolving into a more central role in U.S. businesses, comparing it to the evolution of the IT department.

"Back in the beginning, the IT guy sat off in the corner and was kind of different and spoke his own language," Makower said. "Now we're all IT workers. IT is critical to every business' strategy."

The current evolution of sustainability — driven in part by resource constraints, energy costs and consumer demands — is similarly moving to the core of business strategy.

"It's not a perfect parallel to IT," he said. "But it's been interesting to watch more CFO's, more human resources professionals, more operations managers getting involved. It's no longer ghettoized."

Another business-driven trend Makower sees rising is something that GreenBiz has started calling "Verge." As energy grids, transportation systems and the built environment gets greener and smarter, the result will be a different way of life where technology-enabled buildings and transportation make more efficient use of resources.

In the "Verge" world, the lines between sectors blur — car makers become energy companies, waste companies become commodities brokers, electronics retailers get into the solar industry.

This industry convergence will do a lot to move the world away from a dependence on carbon and Makower points out that it's happening without the aid of government regulations that would put a price on carbon or otherwise regulate emissions.

"Companies have moved past thinking about regulations as the driver," he said. "Carbon is still interesting to them because carbon emissions are seen as a proxy for efficiency.

"We're not yet to the point that there is a 'Chief Energy Officer' within companies, but I feel confident that there will be," he added. "Energy will become strategic."

Green energy was conspicuously absent from President Obama's jobs speech last week, prompting some to call out the president for backing down.

While Makower acknowledged that leadership from Washington would be nice, he's looking to state governments — and more and more to the business sector — for clean-economy leadership.

"You talk to anyone in the auto industry, or in silicon valley, and they will tell you: 'We did not see five years ago how quickly the electric car market would ramp.'" Makower said. "That speaks to disruptive innovation."

And while businesses are innovating toward cleaner solutions, they're also investing in them.

"I don't have numbers on this, but I'm pretty sure we've seen a crossover in the last couple of years where venture capital firms are no longer the biggest funders of clean technology innovation, it's now corporations."

@SustainbleBzOR | christinawilliams@bizjournals.com | 503.219.3438