Förderung der Umwelttechnologien durch Venture Capital - Investitionen von Risikokapitalgesellschaften

Environmental impacts like the greenhouse effect and the need to decrease energy and commodity based costs lead to the requirement of developing environment friendly devices, also called cleantech or greentech, and bringing new ways of producing energy and consumer goods on the market. One possibility to strengthen the research and development of environmental engineering and to promote the usage of environmental engineered products and equipments is the funding of companies, which construct and produce cleantech, with venture capital. The amount of venture capital investments in cleantech companies as well as the cleantech venture capital investments’ share of the whole amount of venture capital investments increased sharply in Europe and in the USA in the last years. This boost of venture capital investments helped the environment engineering and its devices to improve developments and diffusion processes. Moreover, national and supranational politics implemented regulatory measures like the EEG in European countries or the European Union’s climate package to focus on the development of cleantech. The aim of these political activities is to make these environmental technologies more attractive for business and also for venture capital investments. The result of this paper’s statistical analysis of venture capital investments in cleantech companies in Europe and in the USA combined with this paper’s analysis of qualitative facts states a strong correlation between venture capital investments and promotion of development and diffusion process of innovations of environment engineering.