فراتر رفتن از بهترین تکنولوژی و قیمت حداقل: درباره اولویت سرمایه گذاران انرژی های تجدید پذیر برای مدل های کسب و کار مبتنی بر خدمات

Renewable energy is becoming increasingly important for economies in many countries. But still in an emerging industry, renewable energy requires supportive energy policy helping firms to develop and protect competitive advantages in global competition. As a guideline for designing such policy, we consult well-informed stakeholders within the renewable energy industry: investors. Their preferences serve as explorative indicator for assessing which business models might succeed in competition. To contribute to only limited research on renewable energy investors’ preferences, we ask, which business models investment managers for renewable energy prefer to invest in. We report from an explorative study of 380 choices of renewable energy investment managers. Based on the stated preferences, we modelled three generic business models to calculate the share of investors’ preferences. We find exiting evidence: a “customer intimacy” business model that proposes best services is much more preferred by investors than business models that propose lowest price or best technology. Policy-makers can use those insights for designing policy that supports service-driven business models for renewable energy with a scope on customer needs rather than technology or price. Additionally, we state important implications for renewable energy entrepreneurs, managers and research.

Renewable energy is said to have become increasingly important for economics in many countries (UNEP, 2009: 57). For this to work, effective energy policy stimulates public investments (e.g. through feed-in tariffs) and through other initiatives helping to increase the competitiveness of renewable energy companies. For instance, the European Union communicates directives in this regard under “Energy policy for a competitive Europe” and states: “Europe's citizens and companies need a secure supply of energy at affordable prices in order to maintain our standards of living. At the same time, the negative effects of energy use, particularly fossil fuels, on the environment must be reduced. That is why EU policy focuses on creating a competitive internal energy market” (http://ec.europa.eu/energy/index_en.htm). In this regard, the EU requests actions plans of affiliated governments by mid 2010 covering energy policy to support the renewable energy targets in EU countries (ibid.). Similar action plans exist in other countries (e.g. Bundesamt_für_Energie, 2008). As a guideline for effective content of such action plans and for designing further policy in this regard, we consult investors as well-informed stakeholders within the renewable energy industry and investigate their preferences. Literature frequently discussed that investor’s preferences offer explicit and implicit information for decision-making of various stakeholders (e.g. Weber-Henschel, 2002: 98). However to our knowledge, this source of information is applied in the context of energy policy for the first time. Policy-makers can leverage that knowledge as an indicator of which renewable energy firms will be successful in future competition. Further, such an investigation is of interest for entrepreneurs and managers for understanding how to adjust their initiatives with the investment community’s requirements and thus increasing the likeliness of fundraising success. 1.1. Background and organization of the paper Investments in renewable energy rose greatly during the last years and market research companies expect such investments to grow further in the future (e.g. NewEnergyFinance, 2009). In line with those assumptions, scholars would like to investigate investors` acceptance of renewable energy (Wüstenhagen et al., 2007) and the first research has already started to elaborate on investment choices of investors in the renewable energy sector (Bürer and Wüstenhagen, 2009 and Oschlies, 2007). Based on this research, we assume that investors commonly assemble extensive knowledge for their investment decisions and are well informed about the industry structure and predominant competitive forces. In preliminary explorative research with renewable energy investment practitioners, we learned that investment managers utilize business models as qualitative indicators to evaluate the future potential of a firm to create economic value. Business models in this regard provide a “heuristic logic” towards value creation (Chesbrough and Rosenbloom, 2002). We also know from the literature that business models are important in attracting investors and that poorly developed business models are one of the major reasons why companies fail in raising funds (Shanley, 2004). Thus, we tie in with discussions on business models and ask which business models renewable energy investment managers prefer to invest in. We report from a choice-based conjoint experiment (CBC) with investors (Clark-Murphy and Soutar, 2004, Gustafsson et al., 2007, Louviere et al., 2003, McFadden, 1986, Orme, 2010, Oschlies, 2007, Riquelme and Rickards, 1992, Sammer and Wüstenhagen, 2006, Shepherd and Zacharakis, 1999 and Train, 2003). Based on investors’ choices, the conjoint experiment provides the possibility to display the value of different business model components for renewable energy investors. We intend to contribute in several areas: first, we provide insight on renewable energy investors’ business model preferences. These have implications for energy policy and may serve as indicator for designing effective energy policy that fosters competitiveness of renewable energy firms and contributes to further diffusion of clean energy. Further, entrepreneurs and mangers may utilize the results for fundraising, formulating corporate strategies and designing business models. A peripheral contribution is to research on decision-making in finance; our work enhances the concept of business models by contributing explorative evidence on the value of different business model components from an investors’ point of view. We proceed as follows: in the next section we briefly discuss business model theory. The featured understanding of business models serves as the basis for the experimental design later on. Then, we discuss aspects of our sample to characterize investment managers for renewable energy in general and to better understand whom we asked. In the method section, we elaborate on the choice-based conjoined methodology. We then present our results. Due to a small sample size, we are not able to test a hypothesis, thus we explore renewable energy investment behavior and state propositions. Based on the stated investors’ preference, we model three generic business models and calculate the investors’ share of preference for each of them. We wrap up by drawing conclusions and pointing to implications for energy policy and for renewable energy entrepreneurial and managerial practice and research.

We report from choice experiments with investment managers for renewable energy, in order to answer our research question, asking which business models investment managers for renewable energy prefer to invest in. Based on the stated preferences we modelled three generic business models to calculate the share of investors’ preferences. We find exiting evidence: a “customer intimacy” business model that proposes best services is much more preferred by investors than business models that propose lowest price or best technology. We find important implications for energy policy to support customer intimacy within renewable energy. Governmental action plans for renewable energy in this regard should be (re-)designed not only to support technology and production focused business models, but also those that focus on best services as a value proposition. Such policy would be effective bottom-up, with customer needs as starting point, rather than focusing on technology and production only. We see three main ways for energy policy to do so: first, energy policy could help in promoting service-oriented business models that lower transaction costs for renewable energy, for instance through incentives. Second, energy policy could advance executive education for renewable energy, especially in the field of marketing and sales. Such executive education would promote a shift in managerial attention from a focus on technology towards customer needs. Third, energy policy could sponsor research and transfer of knowledge for renewable energy services and best practices for that. Drawn from our results, we find implications for renewable energy entrepreneurs and managers for improving financial relations and reassessing their company’s business model design. First, we strongly encourage entrepreneurs and managers to design “customer intimacy” business models that propose best services as we reveal a high investor preference for those business models. Second, entrepreneurs and managers should avoid business models with unclear value propositions. Third, innovativeness should be only approached if it can be developed towards an industry leading capability. For industry average, entrepreneurs should concentrate on the deployment of other capabilities than innovativeness, like for instance marketing and sales. Finally, we recommend clearly communicating business model characteristics instead of (or in addition to) financial figures, because we find business model aspects have more impact on investors’ decision-making. Limitations of our work are supposable and lead to further research. First, conjoint analysis draws on self-reported data, hence stated preferences. In this regard the methodology itself faces a limitation as stated preferences are not necessarily reflecting actual behavior. Additionally, conjoint experiments apply generic settings and such experimental settings cannot cover all influencing variables. Taking that into consideration, this research can only be a first step in understanding the investment managers’ behavior. Further research should elaborate on real-investment observations to reveal investors’ preferences. However, observations need a broad dataset, which has not yet been available for renewable energy as the industry is at an emerging stage. In this regard, the experimental setup appears suitable. Second, we only report from a small sample. Thus, our research is explorative mainly and states propositions rather than testing theory. Due to this, our findings do not state evidence on how preferences differ among different investors. For instance, business model assessments could differ between large cap and small cap investors or between short- and long-term investors. We also find limitations in the relatively short period of time investors in our sample have been investing in renewable energy, which may raise the question of whether investors with more years of experience would evaluate investments differently. Thus, future research should seek to gain more knowledge on how renewable energy investment preferences differ among different investor types. In particular, we encourage further research to elaborate on whether and how industry experience or investment style (short term vs. long term investor) impacts renewable energy investors’ investment preferences. Further, we encourage research to conduct an inter-industry analysis to elaborate on the results in comparison with other industries to discuss differences and similarities.