Accelerating the decarbonization of incumbent firms through progressive resource efficiency entrepreneurship

With 25 years to go to the UK’s Net Zero target, we need to accelerate the decarbonization of incumbent firms across sectors. By exploring both the private and public sector investments in the technical solutions that tackle climate change (‘Climate Tech’), for the first time this work categorizes three types of innovations for incumbent decarbonization and identifies the untapped potential of resource efficiency entrepreneurship. The characteristics of this innovation type are explored in three comparative case studies of spinouts from the University of Cambridge in a range of sectors. The findings reveal four barriers to the implementation of resource efficiency innovations; the implementation burden, the marketing strategy and incumbent buy-in, the value and financing of resource efficiency innovations, and the timelines of benefit and risk of lock-in. This contributes to the research field intersecting open innovation and resource efficiency, providing initial insights to resource efficiency entrepreneurs on the challenges they should address and showcases these risks to incumbents.