Terry Cooke on China, Cleantech and US Readiness

Terry Cooke spoke to the Cleantech Alliance Mid-Atlantic last week. I'm hoping to do a more extensive piece or interview with Terry at some point, but for now I wanted to share one of his points from the talk:

"Any CEO working on anything related to cleantech has to be thinking about China. China is the world’s largest market for needed application and deployment and that will not change next month, next year or next decade.

On the investment side, China is investing in absolute terms $2 for every dollar of U.S. private and public investment in cleantech. (Adjusting for the relative size of our economies, this mean China is currently out-investing the U.S. by a six-fold factor).

Technologically, the innovation and trade-flows are increasingly becoming a two-way street (as witnessed by the U.S. federal government’s commitment to a $150 million joint research center with China for jointly-developed and jointly–owned cleantech intellectual property).

As these facts sink in, we will all need to get prepared – at the company level, the regional level, and the national level – to sell our cleantech products and ideas to Chinese organizations."

Terry Cooke is currently a 2010 Public Policy Scholar with the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington D.C., researching policy implications of U.S.-China clean energy cooperation/competition. He is the founder of GC3 Strategy, which works with U.S. companies seeking to partner in Greater China. Terry was a Director of the World Economic Forum from 2006-08, responsible for Asian Corporate Partnerships, and a career-member of the U.S. Senior Foreign Commercial Service from 1988-2002.