Helping entrepreneurs commercialise products and grow their companies

CLT is the largest and most established clean tech incubator in the UK. We have helped over 350 companies launch new products and services by providing business advice, market insights and commercialisation support.

CLT helps small companies solve practical problems so they can secure first sales and early-stage investment. We do this by assessing SME’s level of commercial readiness, scoping support tasks, and delivering useful, focussed and actionable advice.

We carry out a diagnostic assessment to identify a venture’s level of commercial readiness relative to its stage of technical development. This proprietary structured approach assesses the key commercial dimensions including strategy and business planning, investor readiness, degree of technical innovation, and the team dynamics.

The diagnostic helps us scope out and deliver specific tasks of work to close any identified gaps. We draw upon our experience, market awareness and network of sector professionals to deliver value to the venture team.

CLT has coordinated and delivered over 500 support tasks including through BEIS’s £72m Energy Entrepreneurs Fund and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) Cleantech Incubator.

Working with industry and SMEs to realise value from new ideas

CLT is a respected player in the UK’s cleantech innovation space. We advise the government on how to set up and run effective innovation programmes. And we work with businesses to turn innovative ideas into revenue-generating products and services.

CLT helps corporates figure out how to build their innovations into revenue-generating products and services by identifying new value propositions in adjacent markets. We do this by carrying out a landscape analysis to validate an innovation’s “techno-market fit”, a competitive analysis of alternative solutions, and an economic analysis for investment decision-making.

CLT also works with industry supply chains to maximise the value of their investments in innovation and achieve total-sector benefits. We do this by pinpointing technical or operational challenges that are common across most players in a sector. Then we organise innovation challenges to mutualise the cost of solving the problem between innovators and likely industry buyers.

This boosts the confidence of small innovators to develop new solutions because there is a clear market pull from industry buyers. And it lowers the cost of innovation for each individual end-user since they pooled resources to solve common problems.

Open innovation embraces collaboration. CLT knows this approach is necessary for clean tech since it focuses resource and effort on agreed priorities. We have used our open innovation ethos when working with, for example, Innovate UK through its Catapult Centres and BEIS’s Energy Innovation programme.

CLT is a respected player in the UK’s cleantech innovation space. We advise the government on how to set up and run effective innovation programmes. And we work with businesses to turn innovative ideas into revenue-generating products and services.

Sharing UK excellence with the world

Trade bodies benefit from CLT’s detailed market awareness. Large corporates benefit from CLT’s network of innovative start-ups. SMEs benefit from CLT’s connections into global value chains.

CLT works closely with businesses and governments to identify cleantech trade opportunities and promote UK companies abroad.

CLT maps out UK cleantech capabilities and matches them with international demand. Then we connect SMEs with opportunities in global supply chains. Doing this at a detailed level – looking at sub-sectors and technology components – gives meaningful insights that can feed into focused trade missions.

Through the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) Prosperity Fund and trade agencies we have supported exports of energy efficiency, renewables and energy storage to India as well as green finance investments in Mexico.

Cleantech SMEs in our network are constantly commercialising innovative products and services. That gives us insight into areas of emerging UK competitive advantage. Our connections with SMEs complement the strengths of large corporates and differentiates CLT’s offer, making us a high-value strategic partner.