Recognizing that I get into trouble for pitching the role of the world’s major corporations in driving cleantech innovation and - supposedly - ignoring the role of fledgling companies, let me show you how it’s working.

By Graham Russell, Executive Director, CORE

General Electric just announced a $200 million fund to identify young companies with technology that will encourage the development of the smart grid.

The most significant sentence in this item describing the initiative is the one which describes GE as “a top provider of smart meters for the smart grid.” GE isn’t setting up this competition because it’s the right thing to do for the planet: it’s doing it because it hopes to find technolgies that will catalyze the growth in sales of products and services to the smart grid that it already knows how to deliver. It’s a plain old market-driven game plan.

And…. what will happen is that a couple of small technology companies will take advantage of this initiative and see their technology catapulted to success. Hundreds of the world’s largest corporations are establishing this type of program to find the technologies that will enable them to build competitive advantage in the new, green economy.

What’s more, my taxpayer dollars are NOT being used to fund government bets on all sorts of questionable technologies. What’s not to like? I rest my case!