|  Clean technology companies – knowledge-based technologies that purport to reduce environmental impact through products and services – are growing so fast that they are struggling to recruit the top talent they need to progress from struggling start-up status to mainstream acceptability. The sector is made up of mostly small or medium-sized businesses, often starting out in university laboratories, but as concerns over climate change and energy security increase, growth rates are phenomenal.
“There are enormous amounts of money chasing some very interesting technologies,” says Claire Skinner, chief executive of specialist recruitment firm Ruston WHEB, which focuses on environmental and clean energy markets. The firm was formed to serve the needs of WHEB, a clean technology venture fund, but is now a thriving business serving the entire sector. The amount of venture capital and private equity investment in clean energy companies grew by 167% in 2006, while the NEX index of clean energy stocks rose 33%. In the first half of 2007, the market has risen by 30.9%. Michael Liebreich, chairman and CEO of clean energy sector analysts New Energy Finance, says: “There is no shortage of capital for good technologies or projects; the only real bottleneck is people.” “This is a rapidly growing sector, and the companies are fairly young,” says Andy Seddon of environmental recruitment agency Allen & York. Partly, the skills shortage arises because as companies grow, the skills they need change. “With any technical company, there has to be a progression from the lab bench, through research and development, to commercialisation and the global marketplace,” says Skinner. Partly, the problem is due to the loyalty that the sector inspires from the people involved, making it hard to prise them away from their companies. “People in clean technology can be quite attached to the firms they work for,” says Mark Shorrock of Low Carbon Accelerator (LCA), a clean energy venture capital fund. The right management is vital to the success of these companies. “If you ask venture capital firms in this market if the performance of a company is what they expected, there is often a barrier because they have not got the right person in place to drive the next phase of growth,” Skinner says. Salaries are often too low to attract people with the experience companies need, says Kim Heyworth of WHEB Ventures. “People can be unwilling to accept a package that is less in cash terms than they are used to, even if there is a substantial element in shares.”  In venture capital, the key gap is serial entrepreneurs – people who have started and successfully grown one business and who can bring those skills to bear on another one. “It takes time for people to learn new skills and new industries,” says Liebreich. “The sector is so new that there just aren’t that many serial entrepreneurs.”
On the investment side, you need people with experience of the energy industry, Liebreich adds: “There is no shortage of people who think clean energy will be just like investing in software or biotech, but they are dangerously wrong as the economics are very different.” |