Many years back, I had the opportunity to do a whirlwind tour of the silicon valley icons (google, apple, yahoo, facebook), three of which had been a startup about rwo decades back or thereabouts.
More than anything else, what struck me was the proximity of these firms, which made me do a detailed blog post on the topic.
Industrial/sectoral clusters can be powerful. They can enable significant acceleration of the overall ecosystem through dramatic enhancement of efficiencies at many different value chain components of the ecosystem. This has been proved in many industrial clusters around the world and in India too - be they the auto clusters (Chennai, Pune, Gurgaon), IT clusters (Bengaluru), Textile clusters (Tiruppur, Ludhiana, Delhi NCR...)
Can clusters benefit climate tech as well? Especially the climate tech startup ecosystem? I strongly believe they will.
If climate tech startup clusters are formed based on broad themes (renewable energy, energy efficiency, energy storage, water sustainability, forestry and food) the sub-components of which have significant interdependencies, and if these are further located in the vicinity of industrial cluster relevant to them (e-mobility clusters near auto industry clusters for instance), the overall ecosystem benefits could be quite dramatic both for the startups and for the industry relevant to the startups.
Would like to have your thoughts on this.
