This week, I had the opportunity to attend the Cleantech conference in Toronto to announce Wal-Mart’s partnership with Cleantech.  With their web portal, we are going to be able to cast a broader net to find technological innovation to meet our current and future needs for more sustainable innovation.  With the help of the networks we have built to address key areas like our buildings, fleet, and waste/internal procurement, Wal-Mart and Cleantech will announce on the portal opportunity areas where we will need innovation to create new or enhance current solutions.  

For example, Wal-Mart has quite a lot of organic matter (produce that has gone bad before it was sold, meat or dairy that was expired, etc) and today it goes into the trash.  We are doing some things to utilize this potential waste stream today, but perhaps there are better solutions we haven’t considered.  That is what Cleantech will help us find; better access to potential solutions.  At the conference, I realized just how many groups there are out there trying to fund these solutions.  I had a huge line of excited investors explaining the vast amount of money they have invested and the excitement of a thousand technologies after my talk.

With that background, I walked away excited and troubled.  Excited b/c we have reached the tipping point; innovation will grow and be funded exponentially in this space. 

Troubled because, I don’t understand.  The Bush Administration understands that the opportunity for new market creation and small business development in clean technology has every bit as much potential as the internet boom did 10 years ago.  This is not a new idea; Thomas Friedman explained it brilliantly in The World is Flat.  Moreover, Tom Dorr, undersecretary of the USDA  was at the event, and his ideas clearly expressed he shares the sentiment as well. 

If Wal-Mart has essentially spent the last 2 years showing that the business model of sustainability can work, the VC community has started pouring billions into the market for clean technology, and high-level thinkers in the government have come around, why is it taking so long for policy to get past ethanol?  I understand the draw to ethanol, but I don’t understand why its so hard to look beyond it.  Do you have thoughts?