How to beat your competition with sustainability

Startups addressing sustainability have for a long time been facing the price-wall when convincing potential customers to invest a bit more now, to get a better payoff – both in profit and climate effect, in the long run. Guest blogger Karin Lintrup who's working as Mincs Head of Sustainability gives you all the information you need together with Thomas Drober, founder of OurGreenCar.

Eco-friendly investments
However, this has started to shift, and the new green deal launched by the EU will accelerate this change. Starting this year, the EU is speeding up the move towards eco-friendly investments. The need for investments in new sustainable technologies is large, only within Europe investments of 260 billion Euro/year until 2030 will be needed. This is bright news for all startups with sustainable solutions.

Green transportation
One company where climate action is in its DNA is OurGreenCar at Minc. Offering a green solution to private transport they are seeing an increase in demand for environmental solutions within transports. If everything turns out as it looks like now, their order stock will make them reach their goals in 2021 even without external investments.

The prosperity of future generations
The reason why OurGreenCar focuses on sustainable transports lays in the opportunities of future generations. Or as one of the founders, Thomas Droben, explains it:

“If you want to ensure that you have done everything you can to make life for your children and grandchildren prosperous, you need to think of what you can do to caretake for our climate and to do that change via your company.”

Building upon sustainability
To anyone who is about to start a company, Thomas has a clear message: “You need to start thinking about sustainability as early as possible”. For OurGreenCar, offering a hardware product, it has meant to explore green alternatives from the very beginning. Because of that, it has taken a bit longer to find the right solution and to get the first customer. “But once the customer realizes the value, that it is both profitable and sustainable, it has been very successful.” Thomas says.

Competitive advantage
“It is well worth making this thoroughly from the beginning, because changing from a non-sustainable hardware solution after some time, is much more difficult than creating it from the beginning. And it beats the competition since most existing solutions aren’t sustainable”, Thomas explains.

Targeted actions
During their time at Minc, OurGreenCar has been part of both Minc Incubator and accelerator Fast track Malmö. They have among other things, participated in workshops on how to increase profit and sustainability. “For us, the workshop gave a good starting point to set concrete targets and create a plan for how to address our prioritized global goals in our sales and the business onwards”, Thomas says.

If you would like to know more about how to build sustainability and growth, please reach out to us. We at Minc are convinced that there are no contradictions between sustainability and profit, but rather the opposite.

Karin Lintrup, Head of Sustainability at Minc

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About Minc

Minc is Malmö's leading growth engine and the driving force behind Southern Sweden's innovation economy. Home to Fast Track Malmö, Skåne Ventures, and a portfolio spanning more than 40 nationalities, Minc has turned some of the region's most ambitious founders into world-class companies. Founded in 2002 and owned by the City of Malmö. minc.se