A stakeholder’s meet on Public-Private Cooperation for Clean Energy Innovation was held on 20th December, 2017 at India Habitat Centre, New Delhi. The stakeholder’s meet aimed at bringing together investors, industry, government, and researchers to encourage increased engagement, knowledge sharing, networking and opportunities for new collaborations. The event organized by the Department of Biotechnology (Government of India) and Mission Innovation (MI) - India, was attended by key representatives from Government, Industry, Academia and Investors.

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The stakeholder’s meet aimed at forging ahead public-private partnerships critical to fasttrack clean energy innovation from early stage design to full scale-up. The key deliverables of the proposed meet were:

 

1. Improve mutual understanding between public and private sectors around MI cooperation and support initiatives that can significantly accelerate clean energy innovation.

2. Identifying Government and private sector partnership opportunities, funding needs, gap areas and address concerns of investors and industry partners.

3. Industry and private sector interactions to scale-up technologies on commercial level.

4. Define scope of activities, milestones and expected outputs for MI partnership activities.

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Mr. Kartik Chandrasekhar from Sangam AIC described projects with academia/ government in pre-commercial investments and seed investments.

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• He urged government DBT and DST to intervene in Cleantech in early stage as there is higher risk with MI fast-track projects

• Government to invest in commercialization and cover market risk which is relatively high.

• Cash burn is the highest is this sector and thus a caution for start-ups to manage and conserve cash for survival and crossing valley of death.

• In typical venture capital funding scenario, mode of operation of start-ups will be of caution and slow paced contrary to the expectations of MI

• Under the mandate of MI to fast tract Cleantech innovations, there must be a safety net to deal with ambiguity and failure.

• Venture capital funds are typically cautious of government funding and stated that subsidies create vicious working capital cycles.

 

He highlighted some medium and long term loan programs from DST and SIDBI that might be useful for the Cleantech innovator.

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To download a summary of the entire event, click here

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