It isn’t easy being green: Tips to build your cleantech company

According to Industry Canada, the Canadian clean technology sector is expected to be one of Canada’s top five exporting industries by 2025, and will nearly triple its annual exporting value to $20 billion. 

For a female cleantech entrepreneur like me, these forecasts spell out big global opportunities—not only from an economic standpoint, but for a chance to make a positive impact on the world’s environment.

Breaking into the cleantech sector isn’t always easy, but it’s something you can do if you have an idea, passion, and plenty of patience to see it through. Here are my tips to start or continue building your own cleantech company.

They say that the mother of invention is necessity, but in my case, it was being the mother of newborn twins. Our twins are six now, and we’ve since added a daughter to our family, but back in those early days, our lives revolved around sleep—or more accurately, sleep deprivation.

One morning, as I was blearily strolling the twins—both napping at last—around our Grande Prairie, Alberta, neighbourhood, we passed a house that was undergoing renovations. Suddenly, a generator roared to life. I thought, if you wake these babies up, I’m going to lose it!

I spared the workers my wrath that day, but the experience got me thinking: Why did generators have to be so loud and belch noxious fumes? I began imagining how I could design a new type of portable energy system, and the Grengine Power System—and Growing Greener Innovations—was born. 

Once you have your idea, make sure it’s revolutionary—or at least offers something unique. With the Grengine, I wanted to design a scalable, portable, plug-and-play energy system that was affordable for all.

If you know how Lego works, then you’ll understand how the Grengine operates. The system is comprised of individual battery blocks that can be stacked and snapped on and off easily to create an infinitely scalable, portable energy system. This simple design means people can create micro-grids of any size, anywhere, without a technician.

For example, you could take a block from your home’s Grengine to power your trailer for a weekend camping trip. More blocks could provide power for a remote worksite, or Grengines could be brought together to provide backup power for a hospital in a disaster-relief effort.

The blocks can also be recharged through a variety of means such as an electrical socket, wind or solar power, or even a treadmill or stationary bike.

And more importantly, for parents everywhere, the Grengine is blissfully silent!

I’ll admit it: patents aren’t my favourite part of being an entrepreneur. The process is long and very lawyer-heavy, and getting a patent isn’t cheap. But it’s important for three reasons:

1. It’s a marketing tool. The ability to earn a patent shows people you’re doing something remarkably unique. It brands your company as being innovative.
2. Investors value patents very highly.
3. Patents protect your intellectual property (IP)—somewhat. For cleantech companies especially, it’s important to get the right kind of patent. A patent on a software design may be very easy to get around because there are multiple ways someone can create a similar, yet different, design to achieve the same thing. That’s why getting a utility patent—patents how a product functions or its end result—may be a better a fit for your clean technology. 

Some countries are better than others about respecting IP rights, but eventually, someone will try to copy your product. By staying constantly innovative, you can stay one step ahead of them—by the time they copy your product, you’ve already made it even better. The trick is to make sure your company stays innovative as it grows, instead of falling prey to hierarchies and rigid roles and processes.

To encourage innovative thinking throughout our company, we have an open door for people to bring ideas forward. Anyone from top to bottom can say, “Have you considered this or that?” We give our team space and time where they can research ideas.

We also hire people with an innovative attitude. Our employees have excellent educational and work qualifications, but innovation isn’t something you can put on a resume—it’s something you see in a person and how they behave, how they think, and what they’re passionate about. We hire people who look at possibilities, not the way things have always been done.

Interestingly, a lot of larger companies are finding it cheaper to buy innovation than to create it themselves because there are just so many levels of bureaucracy to push through even for small changes. But if you can maintain a small-company attitude towards innovation as you grow, you can remain agile. Our leadership meets, we go through all the pieces of the puzzle, and we decide then and there if it we’ll go ahead with something or we won’t. If something needs to be researched, it’s done immediately.

When it comes to innovation, it’s really easy for a company to get distracted on the multitude of things you could do. You want to add all the bells and whistles, but that can set you off in so many different directions. You end up creating “scope creep” and you never get anything quite finished or to market.

One way I combat this is to park the great ideas that come to us—but that we can’t yet act on—in a little black book. This way, we can put them aside, but not lose sight of them while we focus on getting our MVP (minimum viable product) to market. We review the little black book every couple of months and add notes about how the innovation would work, so if time allows, we’re ready to move on it.

As a cleantech company, we operate from a triple bottom line: people, profit and environment. Keeping that focus can help guide your business decisions in everything you do. 

For example, when you’re building a supply chain, keep in mind where your parts are coming from and the broader carbon footprint. You don’t want to build a cleantech product without looking at its overall impact.

Owning a cleantech company also gives you prime opportunities to give back to communities all over the world. Recently, I was fortunate enough to meet with the Ethiopian ambassador to Canada to develop a women’s empowerment program using the Grengine.

There’s a direct correlation between not having access to power and poverty, as well as low education and poor health. In Ethiopia, many villages have no power at all, and even wiring a micro-grid is prohibitively expensive, especially in remote areas.

With our program, which we provide at cost, we nominate a woman to be an entrepreneur and set her up with a Grengine.

People in the village can then “rent” a brick for a nominal fee and use it to power the lights in their home. Later, the entrepreneur recharges it with solar panels. This creates both a local business and access to electricity for the village.

If someone moves, they can take their equipment with them because it’s portable. Being able to create a power system anywhere means during natural disasters, hospitals and emergency systems can be set up in a matter of hours.

There’s more than 1.2 billion people currently living without access to electricity, and our mission is to help eliminate energy poverty for good.

When you come up with something innovative, there’s no known demand for it yet. That’s means you have to be innovative in how you bring your product to market and building relationships with potential customers and partners is crucial.

As one example, we’ve had a lot of valuable talks with TD and RBC banks, which are both focused on environmental solutions to solve problems. They actively look for companies like ours that are diverse-certified suppliers, and try to find solutions and connect them to the right people. Finding a champion like that is gold.

In a nutshell, businesses, governments and not-for-profits have recognized that organizations that embrace diversity are more profitable, innovative, resilient and able to operate in a global marketplace. Increasingly, organizations have requirements to buy from diverse-certified companies, so having the certification opens the door to business prospects, trade missions, networking and mentorship opportunities. The Canadian Aboriginal and Minority Supplier Council (CAMSC), Canadian Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, WEConnect International in Canada and the Women Business Enterprises Canada Council (WBE Canada) are just a few of the organizations that provide diverse certification.

You can also look into other programs and partnerships that can help you. Some big wins for us have come from LGBT diversity certification in both in Canada and the U.S., women in trade groups, and Export Development Canada, the Business Development Bank of Canada, and the Trade Commissioner Service (TCS). They’ve helped us get into many, many meetings to meet potential customers. Having government-backed introductions lends legitimacy and respect, building our connection to the Canada brand that’s known for quality.