Hannah Scott, CEO of Oxfordshire Greentech and co-founder of Climate Tech SuperCluster, talks to Sustainability News about her journey from project manager to chief executive – and from sustainability to climate tech – as well as exciting Oxford startups
Even though CEO is Hannah Scott’s official title, perhaps her term of ‘network leader’ is equally appropriate.
Oxfordshire Greentech, which Scott runs, brings businesses and organisations together to ‘encourage innovation, collaboration and knowledge transfer, to facilitate the transition towards a sustainable, low carbon future in Oxfordshire and the world’, in the company’s own words. At its heart, it’s a matchmaking service.
“I love the power of meeting people across a diverse range of industries and helping them to connect,” Scott, who was named in Edie’s prestigious 30 under 30 last year, tells Sustainability News. “When I see someone who is really interested in investing in carbon capture technology for example, and I know we’ve got a member working in biochar who would be super-invested in getting that kind of investment, being able to make that connection for them just makes me very happy.”
Oxfordshire is a near-ideal place for a sustainability network. There is a breadth and depth of industry, particularly STEM, naturally tied to academia. Along with Cambridge and London – Cambridge Cleantech is a sister network to Oxfordshire Greentech – the three cities form a frequently-cited ‘golden triangle’. Oxford-based startups raised £621 million between them in 2023; Scott describes the industrial sector as ‘unique’. In September, the city will host the annual B Corp Festival.
It is therefore a good testing ground. One current Oxfordshire Greentech project, funded by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, is focused on industrial decarbonisation in Oxford. A workshop in April helped create a roadmap and action plan for the sector to decarbonise together. “We’re bringing together that ecosystem to try and better understand what that ecosystem would need to get to net zero, the technologies that should be prioritised, and that will be best appropriate for Oxford,” explains Scott.
The story of how Scott came to run Oxfordshire Greentech encapsulates a professional journey on multiple fronts. Bioregional, where Scott was working as a project manager, was involved in Oxfutures, a now-closed programme which provided support for low-carbon economic development in the county. From this incubator, Oxfordshire Greentech was born in 2019, with Scott a junior member of staff on the project.
Covid then intervened and Scott was furloughed. Needing something to do – “I’m incapable of sitting around relaxing”, Scott notes – she volunteered her time to ensuring Oxfordshire Greentech ‘continued to exist’, as she put it, taking over as de facto network manager. Given the opportunity to move the business forward, and with the blessing of Bioregional, Scott took the plunge.
Lewis Knight, Scott’s then-line manager who originally set up Oxfordshire Greentech, persuaded her with the argument that she could ‘only fail upwards from here’. If it didn’t work after a year, at least you’ve tried something, and you can take that spirit of adventure going forward. If it did work, so much the better. “Thankfully we’re way more than a year on now,” says Scott. “We’re expanding our team, and things are going quite well, I’d say.”
Along with the job title, the other change was moving from sustainability to climate tech – and having more of a business-positive mindset. “I’ve really noticed a shift in demographics,” says Scott. “In the sustainability world, for example, it was very women-heavy, and it was easier perhaps to walk into a room and criticise capitalism, and for everyone there to be ‘yeah, we all believe that… capitalism is broken.’ But when you walk into a climate tech room, it’s very different.”
Scott pauses briefly. “I still have a very strong sense of morality around this, and seeing how big business is fundamentally failing us and not moving fast enough,” she adds. “But I think moving into the climate tech world, you get to understand all of the bureaucracy implied with transformative change.
“You start to understand how difficult it is to shift the levers of change, and how you can’t just shout into the void and get angry about things, because it is really difficult to create change in that way.”
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Scott calls her leadership style as that of a ‘critical friend’; understanding that businesses are rightly being called out on their failings but are also doing some good things which may not get focus.
One current conversation is with a major bank – “they are not well-loved, it’s fair to say, by the climate community”, Scott says – but things are happening behind the scenes. “There is stuff that’s being done, it’s just hard to create change at speed and scale,” says Scott. “I think that leadership [means] understanding that, but really trying to chivvy that along in a way that is positive and creates actual change, rather than this divisiveness and alienation.”
Part of this approach is understanding that all stakeholders are valid and have a part to play. The aggressive activists are necessary to highlight the negative, argues Scott; business networks, like Oxfordshire Greentech, are there to find solutions and make them more visible and scalable.
Scott describes it as ‘understanding the completeness of the continuum.’ “[It’s] knowing that we need shouty voices, we need pressure, we need people power to be saying we won’t buy these products,” she says. “We need that sort of negative push, but we also need the positive pull. And I think a part of my role is to highlight the solutions that are out there.”
So which are the most exciting climate tech solutions coming out of the Oxfordshire Greentech membership right now? Scott cites four startups in three areas: CapChar, which helps farmers make biochar on their land and then use it as a carbon sequestration source; Airplus Renewables, trying to solve the problem of urban wind by constructing wind turbines which can be placed within urban infrastructure, such as on motorway bridges; and Micromelt and RePolyWise, two university spinouts breaking down plastics to the monomer level for greater reuse.
Yet one county can only do so much. While Oxford’s breadth of industry is a strength, Scott notes, it might not be as easy for an investor to find a specific climate technology; for the matchmaking to take place. Enter the Climate Tech SuperCluster, of which Scott is a co-founder. The network aims to link the United Kingdom, France, Netherlands and Belgium, and an estimated 3,000 startups within those geographies.
“People refer to climate tech as if it’s an investment vertical, like fintech or health tech, but climate tech underpins everything,” explains Scott. “It can be applied across energy, waste, water, transport, materials, built environment.
“So [creating the supercluster] is about that sense of aggregation, which we need, because climate tech is complex and diverse and disaggregated, but also bringing together an ecosystem across different regions to lobby for better policy, to use the academic, governmental and business sectors to more powerfully unlock some of these critical problems we’re facing.”
These problems range from retrofitting one million homes per year in the UK by 2030 to meet carbon targets, as well as developing a hydrogen economy. A series of roundtables hosted by the SuperCluster at the annual Cleantech Venture Day in July will explore these issues. Yet this can only go far without a helping hand from the government; Scott notes the UK is ‘abysmally failing’ on retrofit.
It is a similar story with regard to engaging SMEs in decarbonisation, a challenge Scott told Edie was the biggest she had encountered. She notes that for small businesses, engaging with the process is not only time-consuming but difficult, particularly if you do not come from a sustainability background.
The best way to think about it is to see it as future-proofing your business; finding ways to win new customers and forge new partnerships. “You don’t want to wait till the point that legislation does come down the line, which it inevitably has to, given we’ve got a net zero target of 2050, which then really does hamstring SMEs and leaves them out in the cold because they haven’t prepared adequately,” says Scott. “They’ll start missing out on procurement opportunities, especially if local authorities start really driving for all of their suppliers to have a concrete carbon reduction plan.”
Again though, Scott advocates that more can be done from a governmental standpoint. “Ultimately, I think we really will need to see some harsher legislation from the government in order to get these changes happening, because at the moment, I’d say there’s neither enough carrot nor stick,” says Scott.
“If climate change is still going to happen, we can’t just wait around until the market wants it. “How do you artificially stimulate the market and get them interested in this? How do you create positive momentum around this, if there’s no momentum from government policy? That’s a really tough question to ask, but we’re trying to tackle it.”
