If someone told you that they would provide you with funding to develop a product and once you’ve developed a sellable product you won’t have to spend your days selling it to retail outlets – instead you’ll have access to 270 retail outlets in 35 countries getting your product in front of half a billion customers per year – would you do it? Particularly if you’re a green tech company with sky-high overheads and consumers aren’t quite lining up for expensive, lifestyle-changing, eco-friendly technology.
Last week, according to Cleantech, Swedish-retailer, IKEA, announced an investment group focused on five key product areas that it wants to see in its stores within the next five years. The approx. $75 million dollars in the IKEA GreenTech fund will go into development of solar panels, alternative light sources, product materials, energy efficiency, and water saving & purification products. The IKEA GreenTech fund will focus on companies able to produce a sellable product within the next four to five years.
IKEA plans to work with five to ten companies and bring their products to market within three to four years with an emphasis on helping the startups reducing their prices and develop better products.
“Really low prices, and they should be of very good quality. That’s the only thing we look at, we would never look at anything else, we would discard anything else that doesn’t fall into those boundaries,” Johan Stenebo, managing director of the fund said. “Whether it’s home furnishings or it’s greentech products.”
Stenebo continues - “We will be very active on the boards of these companies,” he said. “I think we can contribute somewhat in terms of commercializing the product they are developing, and then, obviously, distributing the product as well.”
Got a greentech product that belongs in IKEA? Email them at igt(at)memo.ikea.com. Learn more about IKEA’s fair labor and green way of doing business at a website launched earlier this year at The IKEA Way
