On the 5th June 2023, Clean Growth Fund held its fourth ‘Portfolio Day’ at the Royal Society for Arts, an organisation committed to finding practical solutions to social challenges. Founders and management from across the fund’s 13 portfolio companies came together for a day of networking and best practice sharing. These important days are held twice a year and give our portfolio companies the chance to interact with their peers, to connect and share knowledge. This day is one of the many ways in which we support our portfolio companies on their journey.
We theme our popular Portfolio Days around a topic that we feel will help best equip our management teams with the skills and capabilities they need to accelerate the cleantech products and services they are developing. This Portfolio Day’s theme was ‘Successful Negotiating’, an incredibly important skill for anyone involved in business and especially important for entrepreneurs to win new customers and build supplier relationships.
Clean Growth Fund invited Professor Ingemar Dierickx for the day to deliver his highly sought-after Advanced Negotiating Skills workshop. Ingemar has a fascinating background having gained a PhD (Business Economics) from Harvard University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School, as well as law degrees from Harvard Law School (LL.M.) and Rijksuniversiteit Gent (Lic.Jur.). He worked as a Professor of Negotiation Analysis at INSEAD for almost 25 years and his research on Negotiation Analysis has been widely published in scientific journals. For three decades he has represented high net worths and corporates in high stakes negotiations making Ingemar an excellent teacher to guide our portfolio teams on the crucial ability to negotiate effectively.
Ingemar set our teams very challenging tasks throughout the day which involved tricky negotiation scenarios to work through together. The feedback on the day’s workshop was fantastic and Ingemar even joined us for the networking, drinks and food afterwards at a local pub, giving everyone the chance to ‘pick his brains’ even further.
We very much look forward to hosting our next Portfolio Day later on this year, hopefully, with some brand new portfolio companies on-board!
