Cleantech Freakin’ Revolution Tour — 1st Event Wrapup
The first Cleantech Freakin’ Revolution Tour event, held this past weekend in Berlin and organized by CleanTechnica and GridHub (with several other partners, such as TechBerlin, which crashed the party), was great fun and seemingly a great success. We had numerous attendees from Germany as well as from Sweden, Poland (a couple of people other than myself!), Norway (one person even driving down in his Citroen C-Zero electric car!), the US, and perhaps elsewhere. We had top-notch speakers from Ukraine, Portugal, Sweden, and (of course) Germany, several of whom are genuinely global leaders on their topics of focus.
But that’s all just fluff — the real signs of it being a success, for me, were that attendees seemed so engaged and interested while watching basically all of the presentations, in the Q&A sessions, and in the workshop; and so many of them came up to me afterward to express how much they enjoyed it and appreciated it. That was when I could finally relax and feel like we achieved what we set out to achieve. To be honest, and to my surprise (I guess I’m overly self-critical at times), I didn’t talk to anyone who didn’t seem to enjoy the event a great deal, and would say without hesitation that most people seemed to get much more out of it than they expected.
We hosted approximately 75–80 attendees for this initial event, and were particularly green thanks to vegan catering and holding the event in an energy-efficient building (a location that I highly recommend to anyone putting on an event in Berlin).
The event inspired common citizens outside of the cleantech industry to get excited about this stuff and likely adopt it sooner. It also helped those in cleantech professions to broaden their views and awareness within their industries as well as into other cleantech industries. We enabled a tremendous amount of networking between cleantech entrepreneurs, and perhaps soon-to-be entrepreneurs. We stimulated political advocacy discussions that I think will grow to accelerate the transition to renewable energy and electric vehicles. We brought more business to particular cleantech companies that partnered with us. … And those are just the broad summaries of what I personally heard from dozens of people during and after the event.
We have much to improve on, and learned a great deal in this initial event, and I hope that will all lead to more of you attending future events that are even better and bigger.
I’m still working through timely videos and stories from my cleantech tour around Los Angeles… as well as ones from Abu Dhabi and even the Netherlands (from one year ago!), but once I can get through that, I’ll publish and write about some of the sessions from CLEANTECH REVOLUTION TOUR → Berlin.
If you weren’t able to make this event, I hope you will be able to join us for events in other cities in Europe and/or North America.
For now, though: thanks to everyone who attended and helped organize this initial Cleantech Freakin’ Revolution Tour event. Talking to an empty room about this stuff is much less enjoyable and pretty close to useless. Just ask my wife…
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