How Norway Plans To Stay Ahead In The Climate Tech Game

Norwegian startup stakeholders met this week during Oslo Innovation Week to discuss how to scale impactful solutions and overcome bottlenecks in order to stay ahead in the climate tech game.

The Oslo Innovation Week is a collaboration between public and private, startup organizations and corporates, local and global companies. The conference has since 2005 been supported by the City of Oslo, with the aim of bringing sustainable business solutions to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

According to the data aggregator website Datawrapper, Norway is the country with the lowest vulnerability to climate change, while being the most skilled at managing to protect itself from dire climate disasters. This can imply climate mitigation policies and initiatives, but also to increase investment to find technological solutions to avert climate change.

Climate tech and cleantech refers to technologies that address the climate crisis with projects geared towards reducing emissions and waste, climate mitigation and adaptation. As the world moves towards renewable energy sources, clean tech is attracting increasing investments as the country shifts capital away from the oil sector. “Cleantech received more than three times as much capital in 2020, as in 2019, attracting almost twice the number of investments,” said Victoria Marie Everssen, Vice Mayor for public ownership and business development at the city of Oslo, during the opening ceremony of Oslo Innovation Week.

“New companies play a vital role in the green shift. And if we’re going to reach our goals, we are dependent on new solutions and innovation,” she continued.

This year’s central topic is ‘Scaling for Global Success’: the aim for the companies is to find ways to expand beyond the national borders.

The competitiveness of Norway, especially against the most-known Silicon Valley is based on the so-called ‘nordic model’, allowing talents to find work-life balance, higher salaries and safer environment to live in.

From just a couple of co-working spaces in the city center born over ten years ago, now startup hubs have multiplied, reaching around 50 accelerators, industry clusters, and co-working areas in the city.

“The support system around startups is extremely strong in order to help us become market-ready,” said Ingrid Dynna, ceo at NoMy, a startup leveraging the power of fungi, adding that aside investment firms, public fundings from local initiative and research centers are steadily increasing.

But challenges remain for climate startup such as NoMy, which is an assets heavy company as, as a ‘harware’ startup, it makes an actual patented product: “Most of venture capitals are more willing to invest in low risk investments such as climate startup producing softwares which have a quicker return of investments,” continued Dynna, “There is a need for them to support hardware companies throughout the long journey.”

For Bjørn Simonsen, ceo at the first listed green investment company on the Oslo Stock Exchange Saga Pure, to keep the Norwegian climate tech ecosystem thriving, there is a need for investors to be more knowledgeable in the industry they invest in, and understand that hardware companies might do require long development cycles, but might hold great potential to mitigate climate problems and bring true system change.

Some Norwegian investment companies, are now aligned with this vision: “We cannot just solve the climate problem by investing in softwares,” agreed Nina Heir, ceo for Climate at the investment firm Katapult Accelerator. Katapult has just launched a new accelerator program for 23 scalable impact tech startups: “We screened over 19000 companies from across 64 countries, and among the ones chosen, 95% are hardware companies,” Heir continued. Among them appear Austrian mobility startup Gleam Bikes providing electric delivery cargo bikes, Italian feed project Ittinsect producing aquaculture feed using circular methods and the Estonian packaging startup Decomer Technology making eco-friendly water soluble packaging solutions.

Beyond investment shifts and educating its pool of investors, Norway also aims at future proofing green investments by finding concrete and transparent ways to measure the impact of Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) goals, the framework helping investors to navigate and screen investments. “Companies cannot just compensate their efforts anymore, they need to do real climate action and invest in solutions,” said Nito Simonsen, co-founder of ClimatePoint, a platform and innovation firm that helps businesses acquire the most environmentally impactful solutions, after measuring climate impact and forecasting their investments through an innovative measuring system. The aim is to ensure that ESG will not just be a reporting exercise, and that business companies will not use ESG solely to gain advantages over competitors.

Over 25,000 attendees joined the Oslo Innovation Week, ending today with the traditional 100 pitches event format, where a jury of investors and startup founders will screen over 100 startups across the world and reward a cash prize of $ 18,500 for the startup to continue the scale up journey and hopefully turn into a climate unicorn.