OPINION
Time to invest in innovation
ZAP Concepts technical director and Powerful Thinking chair Tim Benson says it ’ s time the event sustainability community stopped funding endless ‘ state-of-the-industry ’ reports and diverted investment toward suppliers to enable them to build sustainable solutions
The event sector has , for some time now , known to be a proving ground for cleantech innovations , particularly in the discipline of sustainable power solutions . Portable battery energy storage systems ( BESS ) are a good case in point . In the UK , it took startups like OffGrid and Firefly to deploy and test these in the relatively benign environs of festivals some 20 years ago , before the construction industry sat up and took notice of their potential and transitioned them into their sector , with other markets soon following suit . The importance of this kind of trail blazing cannot be underestimated . In a recent report , Deloitte state that equity investment into the UK cleantech sector has risen from £ 569 million in 2018 to £ 2.74 billion in 2022 , and the event sector has played some role in kick starting this .
However , innovation is no guarantee of success or longevity , especially when the VC backed giants of the plant hire world are waiting to subsume your technology . Whilst this kind of innovation , commercialisation and business sale model may be attractive to some , not all innovators are motivated by the filthy lucre , some are actually in it for more environmentally altruistic reasons and want to remain the masters of their own futures . This can be problematic though , especially when smaller companies do not have the financial resource for essential R & D , bulk purchasing of components and outsourcing of manufacturing capabilities , all essential tenets of maintaining a competitive edge when faced with competition from the major players in their respective markets .
So , what can be done to ensure that the event sector innovators of the future are not stifled or disincentivised from perusing their dreams ? One thought is this – ‘ start lobbying the new tranche of music business philanthropic funding organisations to reconsider their grant application criteria , ensuring they extend to commercial enterprises , rather than purely for notfor-profit organisations ’. Organisations like Earth Percent claim to be focused on ‘ getting resources to where they are needed most ’, a statement that I would partially challenge ,
“ IF YOU ARE SERIOUS ABOUT AFFECTING ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE IN THE EVENTS SECTOR , CONSIDER SUPPORTING THE SUPPLIERS .”
since the most tangible outputs that I have seen from the organisations that they support are , essentially , state of the industry reports . What is really needed is some level of financial support for the supply chain , that is those businesses that provide the tech and skilled engineers to install and monitor it . This is the sharp end of event sustainability , where targets are turned into actions and deliverables . Financial support for campaigns and driving awareness is certainly necessary , but without boots on the ground innovation
Tim Benson
and know how , it becomes rather pointless . I am quite certain that many of you will push back on this , arguing that grants for the commercialisations of new technologies are available through organisations like Innovate UK and I would agree whole heartedly with this . However , before you can apply for these grants , there is a whole lot of work that needs to be done . Design software licenses need to be purchased for product prototyping and visualisation , a bill of materials ( BoM ) created , industry certifications researched , staff trained , marketing plans created and so on . All of this preparatory work needs to be funded from somewhere just to get a project off the ground and in front of major funding organisations . Speaking as a director of three SMEs , all of which have been involved in the design and commercialisation of products or apps that have ultimately contributed to sizeable reductions in the emissions associated with temporary power provision , I can whole heartedly say that some level of moderate financial support in the early stages of a product ’ s development would have greatly sped up our route to market .
In conclusion , if you are an industry philanthropist serious about affecting environmental change in the events sector , consider supporting the suppliers . You can fund hundreds of reports delineating the current state of the industry , backed up with , sometimes , spurious recommendations , but if you do not have suppliers capable of delivering on these , then it is money wasted .
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