Trends I'm Watching

Green Attracting Entrepreneurs

Link: Green Is Good: The Trend Desk - Yahoo! Finance.

...many smart entrepreneurs are chasing the sun. After all, the sun is a darn good energy source. It's free, clean, and plentiful. Enough sunlight falls on the Earth in a single hour to provide power for the world for a year. That's why Bill Gross, who founded Idealab, has launched Energy Innovations, a company that is using a panel of sun-following mirrors to capture solar energy. Nanosolar, another startup, is developing nanotechnology based materials to improve the efficiency of solar panels. Cypress Semiconductor recently announced plans to spin off its solar subsidiary, SunPower, and take it public. And the list goes on. Who's financing these solarpreneurs? It's not a band of granola-munching do-gooders, but some of the top venture capital firms in the country. Last year, VCs poured more than $500 million into alternative energy startups. According to one survey, 21 percent of venture firms now plan investments in this industry. And VCs, we all know, abide by another Gekkoism: "It's all about the bucks, kid. The rest is conversation."

But conversations around the kitchen table are also propelling this trend. Many consumers are responding to concerns about supply by changing the nature of their demand. Take a Toyota Prius. In fact, taking a Prius -- from your neighbor's driveway or co-worker's parking space -- might be the only way you'll get one. Toyota doesn't have enough of these fuel-efficient hybrid cars to meet the extraordinary demand. Other carmakers are racing to catch up. Honda, for instance, has staked much of its future on the newly redesigned Honda Civic hybrid.

Small Companies Have an Advantage

Link: Forbes.com: Three Trends for 2005???.

Venture capitalist Roger McNamee in his book The New Normal writes,

"In the new normal, neither big businesses nor IPOs will get all the glory. Today, size matters less than at any other time in the past 50 years. Thanks to technology, even small businesses can have a global footprint if they leverage the Internet and available tools that are dropping in price even as capabilities increase."

Lastly, in one of those unintended consequences that governments create, Sarbanes-Oxley and the grand inquisitions of Eliot Spitzer are gifts to startups. Smaller companies can focus. Brain cycles in large public companies go to waste attending to compliance issues and other cover-your-rear work.

Microfinance Accelerators

Link: Unitus: Global Microfinance Accelerator.

...A global microfinance accelerator provides the necessary high-impact capital funding and strategic organizational capacity building consulting to the highest potential MFIs in developing countries. ...[It] vastly increases the number of loans an existing MFI can make to the working poor and empowers significantly more families to work their way out of poverty.

By providing the self-employed poor with affordable credit, microfinance has already helped millions of people substantially improve their standard of living. Unfortunately, only a handful of the microfinance institutions (MFIs) that issue these loans have grown to a size where they are making a significant impact on the communities they serve. There are several thousand microfinance institutions throughout the world, yet more than 90% of the eligible self-employed poor lack access to microcredit programs. In general, the programs are too few and too small. Demand dramatically exceeds supply. For microcredit to achieve its potential as a worldwide poverty alleviation strategy, it will be necessary for hundreds of MFIs to each scale to a client base of at least 100,000.