The EcoSend Podcast

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[00:00:00] Chris W: Welcome to the EcoSend podcast. Be inspired, educated, and entertained by the world's most ambitious leaders putting climate at the top of their agenda. Welcome

[00:00:17] James Gill: to another episode of the EcoSend podcast. I'm James, your host. For those of you new to the show, this is a weekly show where we talk to other people in the world of business and running organizations that are trying to make the planet a little bit better.

[00:00:31] I am thrilled to be joined today by Juliette. Juliette is the founder and CEO of Climate Connection, which hosts the UK's largest monthly event for climate professionals. Juliette spent over five years in the U. S. working in early stage deep tech and climate startup creation and is intimately familiar with the innovation and entrepreneurial sector, the entrepreneurial sector.

[00:00:53] Julia is also though, that's not all, Julia is also a public speaking coach and a huge advocate for mental health awareness. So I think we're going to talk about some amazing topics today, Julia. I'm thrilled to have you on the show. How are you doing today? Hi.

[00:01:08] Juliette Devillard: Hello, James. Yeah, doing great. Excited to be here and get to chat through some interesting topics in the sustainability and climate world.

[00:01:15] James Gill: Awesome. Awesome. Thank you for, for joining me. I, I'm curious then tell us more about yourself, Juliette, and, and maybe a bit more about Climate Connection and curious to hear how, how you've gone from your beginnings to where you are today. It's always fascinating to hear the story of, of, of why you're doing this today.

[00:01:33] Juliette Devillard: Yeah. So I think there's two stories here. One is the, the, how did I get into Climate Story? And the other is the how did climate connection come into being story And and so the, the, how did I get into climate story actually I'll sort of start with a bit of a fun fact. I was actually, we love a, a fun fact.

[00:01:50] Yeah, . I was actually a climate denier. In my teens, because I had a terrible geography teacher who came in and basically indoctrinated us that climate change was not real. And which I think if you're going to just take a moment and reflect, like, that In and of itself is a really interesting and important piece, because there's it just shows like the huge impact that our educators have on you know what people's thought is developing to be at those at those early ages.

[00:02:20] And so, yes, I spent probably 3 to 4 years not necessarily kind of actually campaigning against any kind of climate change progress, but certainly kind of staying far away. Like. Sort of like, oh, someone's talking about that. Let's just walk in the other direction. And and yeah, and it's, it's something that kind of that skepticism that, that, that I learned in, in my ninth grade geography class basically faded over time as I, as I kind of took in other news sources and met people who were in the space and whatever else.

[00:02:54] But it still is something that I think back to a lot in in understanding how other people may have come to not believing in climate change and how easy it is to basically be influenced by different people. So that's kind of a little bit of an early on glimpse in terms of how I got into it after my climate skepticism gradually abated.

[00:03:16] I originally thought that I was going to be a diplomat. And I grew up in Geneva, which is very international city home to the United Nations back when it was founded as the League of Nations and very, very international space. And there was always a part of me that wanted to be working alongside other really mission driven people.

[00:03:35] And doing good for the world effectively. And so I was like, you know what? Clearly the obvious path to doing this is let's go off and, and, and be a diplomat and work on big concepts like world peace and all of this type of stuff.

[00:03:47] James Gill: Yeah, yeah.

[00:03:48] Juliette Devillard: And then I went in and actually worked for the United Nations and realized this is not for me.

[00:03:54] And and the relay, you know, I think some of the classic moments was just the recognition of the amount of red tape and bureaucracy and so forth. And it was probably one of the, it was a very interesting experience, but it was probably also one of the most frustrating experiences of my life being surrounded by so many really interesting mission driven people.

[00:04:16] All of whom were like shackled in their ability to actually do stuff because of the, the, the sort of level of bureaucracy and kind of, we need to make sure that we don't accidentally cause a diplomatic crisis. So so yeah, so I basically yeah, yeah, I basically realized through that experience that You know, I, I wanted to stay in a mission aligned sector, but I needed to find a space where there was a drive and the ability to, to actually kind of innovate, change things, bring in new solutions, et cetera, without having to face like X many levels of approval.

[00:04:50] Which was, which is very much kind of the, the, the situation when you work for one of the big kind of non governmental agencies that, that are in that sector. And yeah, so moving to Boston for a master's degree is the point in time where I kind of, you know, Took a moment to figure out what this new pivot was going to be, what sector I was going into.

[00:05:10] And right at the right moment, I came across a really fantastic organization called Greentown Labs, which was a an organization that actually was focused on helping early stage startup founders with climate focused innovations to commercialize those innovations. By kind of building those startups.

[00:05:30] So absolutely fantastic environment, a hundred different innovators, all under one roof or working on, you know, alternative ways of making solar panels more efficient or how to produce chemicals in ways that are, you know, way less harmful for the environment. Like loads of very, very scientific, really in depth innovations that were, were basically being kind of scaled up and commercialized by these early stage founders.

[00:05:54] James Gill: And no red tape.

[00:05:55] Juliette Devillard: And no red tape, yes. It was the perfect environment because it was very much, everyone is like all in on the climate thing, all in on making this happen,

[00:06:04] James Gill: really

[00:06:05] Juliette Devillard: kind of driven by the mission. And at the same time, it was moving at the pace of the private sector. And probably actually faster than the pace of the private sector.

[00:06:13] Cause when you're a startup and you've got limited cash and you're, you know, kind of running up against it, everything needs to go as fast as possible. So that you can kind of get where you need to before you run out of money.

[00:06:23] James Gill: Yeah. Nothing focuses the mind like a declining bank balance, yeah.

[00:06:28] Juliette Devillard: Yeah, basically.

[00:06:30] James Gill: Well

[00:06:30] Juliette Devillard: put.

[00:06:33] James Gill: Amazing. So, so that was, so that was Boston. And then And where are you now? You're now in, in the UK and

[00:06:42] Juliette Devillard: Yes, so yeah, I worked for Greentown Labs and then moved over to California for a different organization called the Activate Fellowship. Similarly focused on early stage science commercialization with a strong focus on climate as well.

[00:06:55] So basically, probably about four years or so of working. with early stage startups in the climate tech space, before I then moved back to the UK and then started Climate Connection.

[00:07:08] James Gill: Incredible. What a story. That's a, that's really a. A real twist and turn what's going to happen next kind of story.

[00:07:15] That's incredible. They'll make a film about this at some point. I'm sure, Juliet. I'm not so

[00:07:22] Juliette Devillard: sure about that, James. I think there are some other stories out there that are pretty great.

[00:07:28] James Gill: I, I So, Climate Connection is your series of events. Obviously there's a lot of events going on all the time. I'm very thrilled to see lots and lots of people talking about climate, especially, and maybe that's the bubble I'm in, but like, there's a lot of great people coming together all around, all around the UK, all around the world.

[00:07:50] What makes Climate Connection different? What's your whole goal with Climate Connection?

[00:07:55] Juliette Devillard: Yeah, so I guess I can tell the Climate Connection origin story now. Oh yeah, go

[00:08:00] James Gill: for it. We're here for this.

[00:08:02] Juliette Devillard: Yeah, so when I moved back to the UK it was basically post pandemic and everything that used to exist in the climate space had kind of died.

[00:08:11] And so I moved back and was, you know, Thinking, you know, how am I going to meet all of the great people that I want to be working with in this country? You know, who, who are the innovators that are working on really interesting stuff? What are the organizations that are pushing this forward at a local and national scale?

[00:08:25] And I was just looking around and I was like, there's basically no events happening. Because everyone is kind of like, not sure about whether we can meet up yet. You know, everything that used to exist that, that brought people together had died off. And so the, the actual first climate connection event basically emerged from me noticing that teaming up with someone who was already UK based and knew the ecosystem a bit better and basically just sending out an invite going, Hey, like, let's hold something so we can all get together in person for the first time now that we're allowed to and and actually kind of get to meet each other.

[00:08:58] And so that was, that was the origin, but what I realized as a result of. You know, a few different pieces like one, probably COVID definitely was a big influencer in this to my background as a, as a public speaking coach and kind of having organized or coach people on how to run really good events in the past was that.

[00:09:17] There was a really big need for whatever events we ran to have a really strong interactive component. So I wasn't interested in running events where you show up and you listen to a speaker for half an hour or a panel for 45 minutes or an hour and then you maybe have some drinks and go home. Considering that we'd all just come out of like being away from each other, it felt wrong to put something on that was basically something that you could have watched on zoom.

[00:09:44] And so everything that we did was really about how do you create as much human interaction as possible so that we're generating conversations, deep connections, people who are going to come back and get to know each other again in the future. So that, that was kind of the inception. And that has. Very, very much being the core of Climate Connection after that, which is how do you put basically human needs and what people actually want at the start of how you plan an event.

[00:10:13] I can say more about that if you want to, but

[00:10:15] James Gill: yeah, no, that's a refreshing take. I mean, I think everyone's been to events where sometimes it feels like the event's more for the sponsors than the attendees. And yeah. And a lot of the speeches can be from sponsors and and yeah. And the, the, the interaction of guests is actually more of an afterthought.

[00:10:35] So that's incredible. So, so the format for climate connection is. is a bit different to that then with, yeah, tell us more about like what, what that looks like today, that like, how is it, how is it different?

[00:10:50] Juliette Devillard: Yeah, so, Many different pieces. I very much talk about the concept of human centric design when it comes to our events.

[00:10:57] So as you said, a lot of what's wrong with the way events are currently run is people kind of go, Oh, we should put on an event because that's a thing you should do if you need, if you know, if you're doing marketing and if you want to be known in the space, like, We should probably have, I don't know, a winter drinks party or we should throw a panel and, and just get some people in and, and, and get our name out there.

[00:11:17] And it's very much driven by, as you said, either the desires of the organizers, if they're doing the event for their own benefits, or it's driven by the desires of the sponsors, if someone's putting on the event and getting it funded by someone else. And very infrequently, is it driven by what it actually should be, which is the desires of the attendees.

[00:11:38] And so if you really want to run a good event, you actually need to stop and think, okay, well, what are the people who I want in the room going to actually appreciate? And how can I create an experience that they are going to remember? So that next time I run an event, those same people are going to come back.

[00:11:54] James Gill: Yeah.

[00:11:55] Juliette Devillard: And so that, to me, is the core piece around how do you design an event. In terms of, like, the practical bits that we have after that you know, we have some internal rules around a variety of things, like never have a speech more than 12 minutes long, because, frankly, human attention span is, even, even that, most of them that we do are, like, seven or so minutes long, but 12 is, like, our absolute max that we'll let people do.

[00:12:17] We have a huge emphasis on interaction, making people meet each other, we'll do facilitated networking where we'll tell people to walk up to a stranger and have a conversation about a particular topic and answer a question together, get into a debate, whatever it may be. Often, honestly, a lot of what we do is basically going, like, a reflection of what is it that annoys us about how normal events are run.

[00:12:40] James Gill: Yeah.

[00:12:41] Juliette Devillard: Yeah.

[00:12:43] James Gill: And so probably

[00:12:44] Juliette Devillard: my yeah, go ahead.

[00:12:45] James Gill: I was going to say, have you ever had to chuck someone off the stage for going on too long? I have interrupted

[00:12:53] Juliette Devillard: people and gone, Hey, you know, your time's up. Like I need you to, I need you to wrap this up.

[00:12:58] So that's, that's definitely happened. And I often give people who I can sense might not follow our rules.

[00:13:05] A bit of a talking to before and certainly afterwards if they, if they do. Yeah, I mean a different rule that we have is is that you just can't sell like even if you're a sponsor yeah, you know, even if you're someone who's hosting us in the space even if you're a startup that's in the middle of a fundraise like One of the biggest rules that we have is like no selling and no pitching your startup or your business

[00:13:27] James Gill: Because the

[00:13:27] Juliette Devillard: reality is like if we're showing up to an event We're not there to be sold to.

[00:13:31] We're there because we want to learn, because we want to be inspired, because we want to hear people's stories. And so that's a really core component of what we do. And I would rather people really create a beautiful talk and a really inspirational or educational talk, and then step off stage and have me walk up and go, By the way,

[00:13:50] James Gill: that started this

[00:13:51] Juliette Devillard: fundraising.

[00:13:52] James Gill: Yeah.

[00:13:53] Juliette Devillard: Then to let them go and do an actual fundraising pitch because they will basically get much less recognition for that. Totally. And a less happy audience basically.

[00:14:04] James Gill: Totally. It, it's so interesting hearing you say that because it's, it's, it's pretty easy to say like our event cares about attendees, it's easy to say some of this stuff, it's even easy to say like, yeah, we don't let sponsors pitch, but like.

[00:14:23] It's very hard to actually follow through and deliver on those, those things. And it's, it's wonderful to hear that that's like such a crucial part of the whole ethos of, of Climate Connection because I, yeah, I think it's just, it's, it's so easy to sit around and sort of say those things, but it's like, it's a very different thing to actually execute on that and truly deliver on that to a point where the audience can feel that too.

[00:14:47] But I, I know, like, even though I haven't yet been to one of the events, I know that you. The audience will appreciate that, and that will be the reason the audience comes back and trusts. The whole damn thing.

[00:15:01] Juliette Devillard: And that's very much what we saw. Like when we started running these events after the first event, basically everyone who attended was like, please run these again.

[00:15:08] Please do the monthly.

[00:15:10] James Gill: And so we

[00:15:10] Juliette Devillard: did. And in the first six months, we outpaced every venue that we hired. We just kept selling out, kept that growing space. Until we UK's largest monthly event for, for climate professionals for climate tech and have. stayed the largest event for climate tech since, and so, you know, now we run 40 events per year on a variety of different stuff, but there is, there's a really, really clear kind of loyalty and appreciation from, from people around just the quality of what we do and the fact that we really stick to those rules.

[00:15:42] So,

[00:15:42] James Gill: yeah. Yeah. And I guess there's also something there about starting with those clear goals in mind rather than like, Running something and then trying to retrofit some of that can be incredibly difficult I guess, and yeah. Awesome. I, I guess, You know, I should live and breathe what you're just saying there and say, if anyone wants to attend Climate Connection, we'll definitely link to the site and make sure it's very easy to check out what the next one's happening because well, I need to get myself along at the very least.

[00:16:13] So carry yourself an extra member if you got room. You are

[00:16:16] Juliette Devillard: very much invited, James. You're very much invited.

[00:16:18] James Gill: Amazing. Now, I, I know, Juliet, you wanted to talk about climate change. innovation, climate innovation in particular, you've clearly got a ton of experience in this space, trying to bring great ideas to life.

[00:16:32] And having seen that on the other side of the pond and seeing that I guess is a huge part of what Climate Connection is doing. So what's happening now? Why? Why are we all not driving? Why is the whole world not driving electric cars? Why are we not all powered by solar panels? And yeah, tell me more.

[00:16:52] Juliette Devillard: Yeah, so they're really Kind of two sub pieces within this that, that I was thinking about talking about today with you.

[00:17:00] And the first is to talk about at the early stages of innovation, what's missing. And then the second is to talk about when you actually have the innovation, why are we not seeing that rollout? Faster.

[00:17:10] Chris W: Sure.

[00:17:11] Juliette Devillard: And, and so when you look at the early stages of innovation, the first thing I'll say is that we are very lucky in the UK to have a really, really good startup ecosystem.

[00:17:21] If you look kind of worldwide at, you know, amount of money invested, like support and ecosystems there, it's basically the United States. And then kind of the UK and then a few other countries in the EU after that, possibly Israel. And so when you look at the amount of money invested and the ecosystem invent of early stage angels and venture capital and so forth, the UK is actually in a really, really good position which is, which is lucky and, you know, Although the government could be doing a heck of a lot more to support startups through, you know, a variety of things ranging from programs to help them build up and commercialize and helping them get factories out there and so forth.

[00:18:01] That's already a really good start. What we're missing though, is when you look at what it takes to actually get an innovation out there. And just to clarify, like the majority of what I'm talking about, when I talk about innovation in this context is hard tech are you familiar with the concept of like hard tech innovation versus perhaps just like regular tech?

[00:18:22] James Gill: It would be good to explain. I mean, I, I actually, I have not actually personally heard the term hard tech. I mean, there's deep tech. There's deep tech, hard tech. Yeah.

[00:18:31] Juliette Devillard: Yeah. People kind of use those words somewhat interchangeably I'm not going to go into the slight differences between them because I don't think that's going to be like super interesting for any, for most people here, but I mean, a lot of,

[00:18:44] James Gill: a lot of tech is quite hard for a lot of people.

[00:18:49] Juliette Devillard: Yeah. So, so, okay, fine. I'll do a quick, my understanding of when people use the word deep tech versus hard tech versus regular tech.

[00:18:56] James Gill: Sure, sure. Yeah, please do.

[00:18:58] Juliette Devillard: Regular tech is Generally in most people's mind, software. So if you're like I work in tech, that could mean I work at, you know, Google, whatever else, where you're mostly working on software packages.

[00:19:10] As a result, it's the kind of thing where once you've created the software package, that's very rapidly scalable. And we can make that, you know, we've, we've created the product maybe with a team of like sub five people, and you can actually go out and sell that to, you know, hundreds of thousands of customers.

[00:19:26] And yes, your team is going to grow over time and your product will get better over time. But the, the time to which it takes you to get that out in the world is much, much more rapid.

[00:19:34] James Gill: Yeah.

[00:19:34] Juliette Devillard: Hard tech and deep tech, almost exactly the same depending on who you ask. Some people will tell you hard tech is that there has to be a physical component to it.

[00:19:43] So, like, is it something that would need to be produced in a factory? Or require some kind of physical infrastructure, or does it change the physical infrastructure of the world? That would be kind of hard tech. And deep tech, sometimes used interchangeably, is basically often considered to be hard tech, plus things that are as hard to build as hard tech is.

[00:20:02] So basically people lump in things like AI or like big data stuff when it's the really complex stuff, not like kind of, I don't know, I've built an add on to chat GPT, more like I'm developing this database from scratch and it's really complex. People sometimes chuck that into deep tech.

[00:20:18] James Gill: That's a brilliant explainer.

[00:20:20] There we go. Yeah, so that's, that's my

[00:20:21] Juliette Devillard: understanding and the understanding that some of the industries I work in have of those three terms. Yeah. And so one thing I understand about like climate innovation is that hard tech slash deep tech is where the majority of what we're actually going to need for the climate crisis comes from.

[00:20:38] Like, there's only so many things that we can make X percentage more efficient by a software optimization. The reality is, you have to build buildings with less carbon intensive materials, right? You have to, as you said, drive cars that aren't producing greenhouse gas emissions. You have to produce chemicals in ways that are not polluting the environment.

[00:20:59] Everything we use in the world around us, I mean, just like physically look around you, right? Anything in your house was produced somewhere or grown somewhere over the plant. It was produced or grown somewhere.

[00:21:13] James Gill: It's in a pot though, it's in a pot, you know. There we go, there we go. It's not just growing out of the ground.

[00:21:20] Yeah. Well, and it

[00:21:21] Juliette Devillard: was grown somewhere by someone and transported to you. And so there's, there's even that will have its own carbon footprint. And so basically the reality of if we want to decarbonize, if we want to hit climate goals is we have to change the physical infrastructure of the world. And that means that a huge amount of the innovation that we're doing is going to be in that hard tech and deep tech space.

[00:21:41] And so here's the difficulty. If you're innovating in that space, you have to, at some point in time. Figure out how to mass produce whatever the thing is that you've just created. And it's not scalable like software is. And it takes a heck of a lot more capital to be able to actually get there. And so that is why basically people think about that sector is more difficult to invest in.

[00:22:07] And why originally at least five or six or 10 years ago, there were significantly less investors there. We're doing a lot better now. But that was one of the biggest things. And the hole that remains at the moment is although we've got a, now a decent number of early stage deep tech and hard tech investors that will come in when you're first developing your prototypes and helping you kind of scale up to a certain stage.

[00:22:29] Once you get to the, I need to build my first factory stage, there's very, very little funding out there. It's really difficult to find funding because the banks will basically go, well, hang on a second. You want me to give you a loan to build a product that can't yet be sold and hence can't be proven that you're going to have revenue.

[00:22:50] And also you're not yet sure whether the factory is actually going to succeed in making it to the standard and quality that's needed because there's all sorts of issues when you start to produce something en masse. And you want me to give you money for that? Like what?

[00:23:02] James Gill: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so,

[00:23:05] Juliette Devillard: you know, there, there's a.

[00:23:06] a subset of specialized investors that will touch that stuff, but there's not enough of them. And so first of a kind is what is called FOAC investment in the climate tech innovation space is a really difficult sector. It's basically the hole that is, that is missing in that kind of innovation process.

[00:23:26] It's sometimes called like the valley of death. The idea being that most of the startups are going to get to that stage. They're like, yay, we finally figured it out. We're ready to produce this. Or at least to produce it on a certain scale. We need a factory. We're good to go. And then crickets. And then they, they fail because that funding isn't available.

[00:23:43] So that's one of our first biggest issues right now with climate. Wow,

[00:23:47] James Gill: yeah, I totally I mean, that's actually such a great explainer and really does a good job, it seems that, yeah, there's so many challenges there that just don't exist in the world of software, which is much more my background, and it's easy to, sometimes I guess, to take for granted, like, incrementally building software, you know you can roll things out to customers straight away, the idea of the number of steps a company has to go through to take an actual Yeah.

[00:24:18] Like hard tech innovation from idea through to something that is a household item or a truly changing is, it's incredible anyone manages to do it in a way, like so, so it's amazing to hear that there are people out there trying to solve that. Yeah, that's, that's incredible. Yeah, they definitely are.

[00:24:42] Yeah. Have you seen any, any success stories that like in, in recent times, like any, anything that's come through this?

[00:24:51] Juliette Devillard: Yeah, there are a handful of startups I would say honestly, primarily in the United States that are getting over this hurdle. And in fact, we are, we're increasingly seeing, you know, Basically startups getting to a certain stage and migrating from the UK to the US.

[00:25:05] Particularly because of, you know, the most recent IRA subsidies and so forth that have come in as a result of the previous government. And so. If I say the previous government, I mean, the new government isn't yet elected, but in process. But yeah, so the IRA really has created incentives and subsidies and so forth that are making it much more attractive for people to go off to the United States, where also capital is generally a little bit more available and produce Those types of innovations.

[00:25:31] So, you know, one of our most recent speakers at our July events was a company called Enzo who are producing tires that specifically made for electric vehicles, because electric vehicles have a very different kind of weight profile to regular tiles and you, you need a different type of efficiency and grip and so forth, if you want to be optimizing that, and they've just opened a factory in the United States.

[00:25:50] And so that was a UK based startup that is now, you know, producing on mass. In the U. S. as a result of those subsidies. So this hole exists all over the world, even in the United States, we could do more fun with more funding there. But it is certainly more acute in the UK than it is in the US, and if we're not careful we're going to lose a lot of our innovators to that migration as a result.

[00:26:12] James Gill: Okay, there's, there's some some homework for some people. I don't know if we have anyone listening who has a spare, I don't know, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of pounds lying around to put into this. Yeah, that's

[00:26:23] Juliette Devillard: usually the scale, that's usually about fifty million ish. Fifty million?

[00:26:25] Okay. Fifty million to two hundred million, depending on kind of what you're looking at, but

[00:26:28] James Gill: Well, if you are listening and you do have 50 million that you're wondering, what do I do with this? How can I make a highly risky investment? But that will change the world. Well, you've now found. You've now found the place.

[00:26:42] So, interesting hearing about that gap in the funding piece, Juliet. But back to earlier, you were saying there were actually two pieces where there's a need for, for investment and help along that journey. So, what was the other side?

[00:26:56] Juliette Devillard: Yeah. So the, the, the second piece is kind of this understanding of how long it takes to actually have things adopted in the world.

[00:27:05] So people talk about the adoption curve as basically a curve where you sort of look at when a new innovation comes out or a new product or whatever it may be how does that product get basically dispersed in the market? And so if you kind of look at that curve. It's a nice little bell curve.

[00:27:23] Many people will have seen something along those lines. And on the, the earliest side, you've got this concept of the early adopters. So this is like, probably a combination of, you know, your mum, your aunt, and your best friends and then your, you know, the people that you know, and then the handful of people who hear about what you're doing, and go like, Oh, you know what, that's weird but I'm into it and I'm going to go be one of the weirdos who supports this at the very beginning.

[00:27:45] And so those early adopters kind of come on and they're like your strongest advocates, so the people saying like, this is awesome, let's roll this out. And then it kind of just increases with a very sort of difficult learning curve initially. Until you get to a point where you've hit about 50 percent of the market.

[00:28:00] And then you've got those late stage adopters who are coming in, who are starting to adopt it because they're seeing it in lots of other places. And they're going, Oh, right. I see, you know, whatever. Solar panels are a real thing, or I've seen enough of those around, I, I think I'm, I kind of get what they're about now and I'm just going to do it because everyone else is doing it, all the way down to the end of the curve, which is where you've got your skeptics, so this will be people who are like, you know, I don't believe in change, like, whatever it is you've made, it's, you know, it's stupid, I like to stick to the old ways, etc.,

[00:28:28] and so they'll be the hardest to convince to get in. Your geography teacher,

[00:28:30] James Gill: for instance. Yeah, well yeah, my geography teacher,

[00:28:33] Juliette Devillard: who, who, you know, I don't know how she feels about that. About solar panels these days, you'd have to ask her and and so that's that that kind of adoption curve tells you sort of how people respond to innovation.

[00:28:44] And that's one piece of it. But the other piece is how do you actually. get those innovations out in the world. And you know, what are the, all of the different human barriers or physical barriers that, that are there to this stuff being produced and mass adopted? And some of them, as we just saw, are related to, well, how fast can you actually produce this stuff?

[00:29:03] Like if you need to go from, you know, a thousand units to 10, 000 units to 10 million units to, you know, multiple hundreds of millions of units. That's going to take years and years and years to build up the factories and infrastructure that you need to be able to get that out in the world. And then you have all of the kind of regulatory side, and then you have kind of people's behaviors and how people are responding to things.

[00:29:23] And are they willing to make that change coming back to that kind of adopter curve is somebody excited about it? Will they change the way that they live their life to use your product? Does your product require? Why are that or not, or is it a product that can just be dropped in? So there's lots of different pieces that come into basically explaining why it is that even if we've got some really brilliant solutions that are actually kind of proven as working.

[00:29:45] Why are they not everywhere in the world already? And when you sort of look at how long this takes, that's where it gets really worrying. And the example that I'll choose here is the one that we just spoke about because it's probably one of the poster kids of, of, of the climate space, which is solar panels.

[00:30:01] Like what is it, what better innovation could there be out there than a, you know, simple piece of like, material that basically takes a completely free energy source and gives you electricity, right? It's like, oh, fantastic. The sun is there. Now we have electricity. Let's use it.

[00:30:19] James Gill: Yeah. Great.

[00:30:20] Juliette Devillard: So, so, you know.

[00:30:21] It's a great innovation. It was actually invented. I mean, let me just double check this so I don't get this wrong. But this, this solar panels were actually invented, I believe, in the 1800s.

[00:30:33] James Gill: Whoa, what? I did not know

[00:30:39] Juliette Devillard: that. Yeah, let me, let me, let me check this one here. Okay. Some of the original research was that, was that far back, but let me, let me be accurate here.

[00:30:49] Yeah, so the, the photovoltaic effect was discovered in the 1800s. And then in 1954, Bell Labs in the United States created the first actual photovoltaic cell, which is made of silicon and can convert sunlight into electricity with an efficiency of about six percent. So, you know, even if you take that as being the real invention, Yeah, that's, that's already like seven, exactly 70 years ago, that was invented.

[00:31:16] And then, you know, it was used in like small scale space projects and so forth by NASA and then various other organizations. And it's only in the two thousands that people actually started really kind of commercializing it for general use. And so if you were to take two thousands as being like, Oh, now we have a product.

[00:31:35] That's still 20 years from 2000 until now to basically get to where we're at now, which is solar represents 5 percent of the world's energy, right? So we're still not at full deployment of solar. And that's if you take a timeline of, Oh, this was available to be, to be used and produced in the 2000s. Yeah.

[00:31:56] So the amount of time that it can take to roll this stuff out to bring also we talk about the cost curve. So to bring the cost of this stuff down, cause the first time you create a product, it costs way more than the, you know, 10th, 100th, 1000th, millionth time, et cetera. So solar panels now are so much cheaper than they were.

[00:32:12] And that. That took, you know, subsidies and investment and people being willing to pay a high price initially and so forth to get there. But all of these different factors just basically go to show that, hey, you could have something that's really cool and they'd have a significant impact on the world.

[00:32:25] And it could take you, you know, decades and decades and decades before you get to, you know, even, even a marginal like amounts as as solar panels are now 5 percent of the world's energy production.

[00:32:39] James Gill: That is incredible and you know, I guess to some extent there's also an element of like, marketing has a big play, big part to play here of like, people need to know about the thing.

[00:32:48] And it's like, I don't think anyone could argue that solar panels have not been known about for like, 20 years. It's like, it's just incredible that the, like, the length of time, time there. It's incredibly eye opening to see that like tracing back to like the 1950s. I can only hope that with the attitudes that we increasingly have as a society today and the technology and innovation we have today that that that timescale shrinks a bit.

[00:33:17] You know, 70 years for a new innovation is a long time to wait to make 5 percent of a dent.

[00:33:25] Juliette Devillard: And that's why, you know, things like governments coming in with subsidies early on legislation, you know, actually making people change the way that they're consuming, working, what products they're using, you know, how factories are operating, et cetera.

[00:33:42] Like all of that is so crucial to sort of force people into adopting things earlier on. And also obviously through subsidies, bring the costs down at the point in time where we're kind of in the early stages of producing it and things still kind of cost more than they should. So there's a lot, a lot to be done on a government level to, to kind of try and accelerate those curves.

[00:34:01] Pretty, pretty difficult problem to solve.

[00:34:05] James Gill: It just as well. There's an event to bring people together to try and solve it.

[00:34:12] Juliette Devillard: Yes, indeed. Yeah. And we do, we do have government members there. We have startups there. We have the investors there. Lots of different intersections of these problems are being worked on for sure.

[00:34:20] James Gill: That is very reassuring. Very reassuring. Julia, I, I know we've gone this has already been a wonderful show and I know we've already gone over half an hour. I'm not as strict as your your talks at your events, but I feel like there's many more topics we could cover. Maybe we'll have to do another episode at some point, but I did briefly want to touch on the future and what you see as the future in, in the space and, and, and the future of innovation, Yeah, any, any thoughts there?

[00:34:49] I think you've already shared a lot, but yeah, I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

[00:34:54] Juliette Devillard: Wow. The future of innovation. I'm

[00:34:58] James Gill: not asking for predictions. Just, just any, any thoughts on how things might change over the coming years?

[00:35:04] Juliette Devillard: Yeah, well, I, so I think one trend that I think is really positive is On the one hand, we are seeing governments come in with different policies to support rolling out climate innovation or, you know, helping people to, to kind of start nudging, helping, forcing, whatever you want to call it, depending on the type of policy different companies and individuals to start using more sustainable solutions.

[00:35:29] That stuff's great. The other thing though, that I think is worth mentioning is that. Because those subsidies have been up and down, because those policies have been up and down in different governments across the world, there has also been, I think, a very positive mindset shift within the innovation sector.

[00:35:47] Where people have gone from, Oh, this is a thing that needs to happen. And therefore I'm going to create it. And as a result of creating it, I'm going to assume that a government subsidy is going to make this a viable product into actually whatever product we create. We need it to be something that is a no brainer to our customer.

[00:36:08] regardless of government subsidies and regardless of kind of what, what may or may not influence that, that adoption from a sort of, I want to be a climate positive company perspective. So to put it simply, basically, whereas we used to go, Oh, we should just innovate because we need things for the climate and we'll just worry about the cost or why the customer will use it.

[00:36:30] That's kind of someone else's problem. A lot of people are now going, actually, no, I'm not We're only going to create products that are also a benefit to the customer from an efficiency point of view or a cost point of view. We're going to pay way more attention into how can this be a drop in solution that can be used with existing infrastructure or existing ways that people do business, et cetera.

[00:36:51] And so there's a, an increasing trend towards like, let's just make this a no brainer product, regardless. of the climate implications and the government things. So you would want to buy this instead of your current product. Even if you didn't know that it was good for the climate

[00:37:07] James Gill: and

[00:37:08] Juliette Devillard: taking that approach and seeing more and more innovators recognize that, and obviously more and more investors in the venture capital and angel world basically like step away from investing in products that are not taking that approach means I think also that we're hopefully, orienting the industry and the things that we're creating to be attractive to people, regardless of whatever the kind of macro policy and economic environment is.

[00:37:32] And that is, that should be the end goal. Let's create climate products. that are just better than what the baseline product was rather than just climate products that are great for the environment and have xyz trade offs from a financial or other perspective.

[00:37:46] James Gill: That makes a ton of sense, like a very aligned interest, win win win, everyone's happy.

[00:37:52] Juliette Devillard: Yeah, and it means that you can sell to the climate skeptics and, you know, people who don't really care about their ESG or climate emissions so far and just be like, Hey, well. You know, you don't care about that, you don't need to report in your country, fine, but you should take this anyway because it's going to make you more efficient, you're going to save money in the long term, and that's really cool.

[00:38:08] James Gill: So your geography teacher will be happy either way. That's brilliant. Yes, indeed. Julia, thank you so much. I feel like we could easily go like four hours today but I, I will, I will, I will painfully wrap the episode there and say a huge thank you for sharing such a wonderful story and so much interesting insight into the world of innovation and making me feel quite uplifted actually for the future.

[00:38:38] We got some exciting innovations and products on the way, whether next year or in 70 years, hopefully, hopefully soon. So thank you, Julia. And for those who want to check out Climate Connection, we'll link it in the show notes, it's climateconnection. co. uk, right? Mm hmm, yep, that's

[00:38:54] Juliette Devillard: right.

[00:38:55] James Gill: And we'll put anything else you want to give a shout out to, any other links or anything?

[00:38:59] Well,

[00:39:00] Juliette Devillard: I think your point just there about, you know, hope for the future, I would definitely say, if you're ever kind of in one of those moments where you're feeling the climate anxiety, or you are just thinking like, we're not going to make it or whatever else, Even with all of these obstacles, I would say like looking at some of the innovations that are being created and the stuff that's being done in the entrepreneurial and innovation sector is probably one of the coolest ways of just like giving you giving yourself a little bit of a morale boost.

[00:39:28] Because when you suddenly realize, oh, wow, someone's figure out, figured out how to grow concrete from bacteria, it just blows your mind. And you're like, great, you know, we might not have figured out how we roll this out. But at least we've got some really freaking smart people working on this stuff and figuring out how to do just things that we couldn't even have conceived of decades ago.

[00:39:48] That's incredible.

[00:39:48] James Gill: I'm gonna have to check that out. That sounds amazing. I have yeah, I hugely hopeful now for the future. Thank you, Juliet. I really appreciate your time today and I'll see you at an event soon and hope you have a good rest of the day. And thank you again for being on the show.

[00:40:04] Juliette Devillard: Thanks James. Yeah, I know this was a lot of fun.