We don’t have a cleantech innovation problem — we have a FOAK execution problem. Over the past year, I’ve been building something I wish I had when I started scaling my first climate tech venture: a practical, experience-based framework for getting First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) projects off the ground. In my latest article, I’ve pulled together my 50+ posts into a structured overview that maps the FOAK journey—from the moment you decide to leave the lab to the day your NOAKs are r

Europe spends a lot of time talking about battery gigafactories. We discuss cell chemistries, subsidy schemes, factory locations, and how many gigawatts of capacity will be built by when. All of that matters. But a part of the battery value chain rarely makes it into these conversations, even though it has a disproportionate impact on cost, risk, and credibility. Battery chemicals. Not cells or packs, but the solvents, electrolytes, and precursors that sit upstream of every c

EU eased CO₂ regulations for automakers at the end of last year. Almost immediately, parts of the LinkedIn community declared the EV transition dead: OEMs will return to ICE, Europe will lose the race, and incumbents will be finished. I argued the opposite. The legislation did not reopen a real path back to combustion. It was a gambit - giving away something to score a bigger victory. In practice, it pushed European carmakers toward EVs. That is exactly what is now being conf

I used to think that US sanctions were reserved for criminals, dictators and Russians. Well, a few months ago, an ICC judge authorised an investigation into alleged war crimes by US personnel in Afghanistan. Then she was sanctioned. Her bank access was frozen. Amazon and Microsoft shut down her accounts. She was treated like an international criminal. If that wasn’t a wake-up call for all working with the USA, this January should have been. With Trump openly threatening tarif

A downloadable 5-step framework for finding clients for your FOAK startup

How frameworks help to avoid hype traps.

After 9 days of the free trial of 2026, can someone please tell me how to cancel the subscription? This week was entertaining: suddenly everyone became a geopolitics expert.
 Mostly AI / data / everything-cool profiles explaining global affairs — often from countries that haven’t had a serious geopolitical shock in 50 years. Fun. Briefly. My own introduction to geopolitics was less theoretical.
In 2014, I was CIO for five power plants in Russia. One ran on a Siemens turbine d

I’ve put together a list of 23 FOAK climate tech projects that are supposed to prove something in 2026 — not in decks, not in announcements, but in steel, concrete, electrons, molecules, and regulatory filings.

When I was working in Russia, January was always a dead month. Mandatory 8–12 days of holidays at the start of the year, followed by another one or two weeks of “extended” vacations. Clients, investors, suppliers — all happy to reconnect, but preferably sometime after mid-January. Even those back in the office moved slowly. Europe doesn’t have the same formal shutdown.
But culturally, January is still a soft month. That is — unless you’re working on a FOAK. In FOAK years, I w

FOAK and planning horizons

An intro to short fantasy novella.

This year ended very differently from how it started. The biggest thing was moving from Turkey to France, following the centuries-old and well-established tradition of Russian emigration. Not for lifestyle reasons alone, but because I wanted to be closer to where real FOAK (first-of-a-kind) execution is happening — in a region that still combines two things I value deeply: personal freedom and a serious attempt at climate transition. Professionally, three things defined my ye

Without clean electrons there are no clean fuels

Chinese EV Exports rose despite tariffs.

What scrapping the Europe's EV target really mean

Every time someone says software-defined vehicle, I imagine driving 250 km/h on the Autobahn and seeing: “System has unexpectedly crashed. Reboot in progress.” That thought led me to dig into SDVs, money, and who actually benefits.

How BP and Shell abandoned their green ambitions

This is a review of key successful and key failed FOAKs in 2025

A recommendation on a podcast about the 2025 EV market

Getting public funds for FOAK in Europe is so hard that companies prefer to change location.