What Big Companies Want From Green Startups
Friday, May 15th, 2009Fellow startups - check out these helpful insights from Greentech Media and take a look at how the big guys are gearing up their green initiatives.
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Unilever, IBM and other companies said they are constantly investigating green technologies that would help them conserve energy or sell products to customers who embrace efficiencies.
What do big companies like Unilever, IBM or Frito-Lay want from cleantech startups? The answer appears to be technologies that will help them go “green” or sell the things they already understand.
Unilever, which makes food as well as personal and household cleaning products, is interested in smart grid technologies, but not because it wants to enter the information technology market. The company is keenly interested in how consumers use water and other resources at home, said Phil Giesler, director of innovation and corporate ventures at Unilever.
“We realized that the major water use is not in the process of making the products but in how consumers use them,” said Giesler at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovation near San Francisco on Wednesday. Giesler joined other company executives on a panel about what large companies want to startups. “That realization has led us to come up with formulations that need less water” to use.
