E+Co: A Tipping Point for Clean Energy Entrepreneurship (A‪)‬

This case describes E+Co’s approach to promoting clean energy entrepreneurship in developing countries and its current strategic challenge; how to scale up its business model to reach 100 million unserved or underserved people in the developing world by 2020. In the last 12 years E+Co was successful at demonstrating and validating an “enterprise centered model” which offered reliable access and improved energy efficiency to the poor in emerging economies. Its approach to bringing the poor up the modern energy ladder, one step at a time, was initiated in response to a challenging project for the Rockerfeller Foundation, marked by a radical departure from the top-down, large scale infrastructure projects sponsored by international institutions. So far, these models had left 2.5 million people trapped into the double bind of energy poverty and energy waste. E+Co’s approach was working well; by September 2006 it had invested in 138 enterprises in 30 countries. These local entrepreneurs currently provided clean energy to more than three million people. The next issue was scaling it all up; however, this risked straining the resources of E+Co’s global team of 38 employees and could change the services the company provided to local entrepreneurs. Tenfold expansion within these constraints required an innovative growth strategy. Supplemental case, E+Co: The Path to Scale (B), product 9B07M055, presents a set of entrepreneurial growth strategies that preserve the core of the model.