{"id":474722,"date":"2010-03-15T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-15T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16432059.post-1328336668183899667"},"modified":"2010-03-15T07:56:06","modified_gmt":"2010-03-15T11:56:06","slug":"creating-cleantech-clusters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/474722","title":{"rendered":"Creating Cleantech Clusters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>by Richard T. Stuebi<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Shawn Lesser of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sustainableworldcapital.com\/\">Sustainable World Capital<\/a> recently posted on the <a href=\"http:\/\/cleantech.com\/\">CleanTech Group<\/a>&#8216;s website his <a href=\"http:\/\/cleantech.com\/news\/5640\/top-10-cleantech-clusters?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter\">list of Top 10 CleanTech Cluster Organizations<\/a>. I was pleasantly surprised to see that four of the ten listings were from the U.S. &#8212; in the places you&#8217;d probably suspect: Boston, New York (Upstate), California (both Northern and Southern). Interestingly, no place in China made the cut.<\/p>\n<p>As Lesser notes, &#8220;creating a cluster is no simple task.&#8221; In my research, I really haven&#8217;t found any predictable formula or recipe for nurturing along a cluster&#8217;s formation. I recall once asking a serious student of regional economic clusters, <a href=\"http:\/\/facultyprofile.csuohio.edu\/csufacultyprofile\/detail.cfm?FacultyID=E_HILL\">Ned Hill<\/a> of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.csuohio.edu\/\">Cleveland State University<\/a>, for his insights. In his view, there are three necessities that must be in place for a cluster to emerge in a given geographic area:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>First, there must be a critical mass of people and organizations within and between which leading-edge knowledge transfer occurs.<\/li>\n<li>Second, the people and organizations that set the standards for the industry must be present.<\/li>\n<li>Third, an extensive set of pilot and demonstration projects must exist at which experimentation can be conducted to develop real-world improvements.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Without these three factors in place, it&#8217;s very much an uphill push to create an industry cluster.<\/p>\n<p>Here in Northeast Ohio, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nortech.org\/\">NorTech<\/a> &#8212; the economic development organization leading efforts to nurture technology-based clusters in our region &#8212; has recently launched an initiative in partnership with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.clevelandfoundation.org\/\">The Cleveland Foundation<\/a> called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nortechenergy.org\/\">Energy Enterprise<\/a> to help spur subclusters of activity in our region in various segments of the advanced energy technology spectrum.<\/p>\n<p>In planning the activities of Energy Enterprise, we&#8217;ve often talked about what it takes to build a cluster, sometimes getting frustrated at all of the factors beyond the control of any agency aiming to be a catalyst for cluster growth. Although we at Energy Enterprise don&#8217;t have a definitive playbook, we take some solace that cluster-building is inevitably a struggle for everyone.  We have no illusions that we can enter such a top-10 list very quickly, having come a bit late to the game relative to others, but aspire that we can eventually get there in the years to come.<\/p>\n<p><em>Richard T. Stuebi is a founding principal of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nortechenergy.org\/\">Energy Enterprise<\/a>, the advanced energy initiative at <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nortech.org\/\"><em>NorTech<\/em><\/a><em>, where he is on loan from <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.clevelandfoundation.org\/\"><em>The Cleveland Foundation<\/em><\/a><em> as its Fellow of Energy and Environmental Advancement. He is also a Managing Director in charge of cleantech investment activities at <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.esplp.com\/\"><em>Early Stage Partners<\/em><\/a><em>, a Cleveland-based venture capital firm.<\/em><\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\">Content provided by and all rights reserved to CleantechBlog.com.  Also check out http:\/\/www.cleantech.org<img width='1' height='1' src='https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/16432059-1328336668183899667?l=www.cleantechblog.com' alt='' \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Richard T. Stuebi Shawn Lesser of Sustainable World Capital recently posted on the CleanTech Group&#8216;s website his list of Top 10 CleanTech Cluster Organizations. I was pleasantly surprised to see that four of the ten listings were from the U.S. &#8212; in the places you&#8217;d probably suspect: Boston, New York (Upstate), California (both Northern [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6422,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-474722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6422"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474722\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}