Insights
Field notes
Short practitioner pieces on the commercialization gap: the structural distance between what a technology can do and what an institutional market can justify, procure, integrate, trust and adopt.
Field Note · Permitting and procurement ·
The permit was never the problem
Permitting is an external, documented, date-stamped delay, which makes it the most comfortable thing in any project to blame. In nearly every stalled clean-technology project the permit was not the binding constraint but was sitting in the queue behind it — which is why accelerating it produces a faster route to the same waiting room.
Field Note · Water reuse ·
Nature ran the largest water utility on Earth and never sent an invoice
Rain spends months, years or millennia underground, and while it is down there the ground stores it, treats it and moves it. Reuse collapses that loop to hours. The three services do not disappear — they move onto somebody's balance sheet, and almost nobody prices all three.
Field Note · Design basis ·
There is enough water in the Danube. The pumps cannot reach it.
A nuclear plant supplying close to half of Hungary's electricity is being switched off block by block, and its operator says there is still enough water in the Danube to cool it. The pumps just cannot reach it. Behind that sits a design assumption the river is now more than a metre below.
Field Note · Dependencies ·
AI’s next bottleneck runs through water infrastructure
AI infrastructure is usually discussed through chips, capital and electricity. A proposed 612-megawatt data centre near Sydney offers a more physical lesson: strong computing demand cannot accelerate a pipeline permit, a grid upgrade or a utility timetable.
Field Note · Market sizing ·
PFAS cleanup could become a trillion-euro market. That does not mean it is the right market.
The European Commission put a number on the cost of PFAS pollution: over a trillion euros to treat water that is already contaminated. That number is not a market size, and treating it as one is where a lot of PFAS commercial strategy quietly falls apart.
Field Note · Commercial system ·
Why a strong sales team cannot repair a broken commercial system
Revenue misses plan, so management replaces the sales director, raises the target, and buys a new CRM. Often the defect sits further upstream — and a stronger sales team just executes it faster.
Field Note · Sequencing ·
The most expensive mistake in clean tech is doing the right things in the wrong order
A completed pilot, new distributors, a senior sales hire, a trade-show booth, a fundraise in progress — all individually correct, and still flat revenue. The order these things happen in is usually the real problem.
Field Note · Investment risk ·
The commercialization gap investors keep underestimating
A pilot can prove performance without proving purchase logic. Why both sides of the table read pilot success as commercial de-risking, and the five questions that tell them apart.
Field Note · Channel ·
Nineteen pins on a map is not a sales organization
Appointing a distributor is an administrative event. Building a sales system is slow work. Coverage is not capability, and a pin is not a pipeline.
Field Note · Readiness ·
Your technology is TRL 9. So why is nobody buying it?
Technology readiness and commercial readiness are two different scales, and almost everyone watches only one. A company can be TRL 9 and CRI 1 at the same time — in clean tech, that is the default, not the exception.
These field notes are also published on Substack, alongside longer pieces. Follow on Substack