Most of the time, this blog focuses on big listed companies. And yet, whilst they tend to be the most relevant to alternative energy investors, in so doing we are missing out on something crucial; innovative small companies that just might one day deliver the game-changing invention that will BE BIG. It may be a cliche, but my admittedly partial anecodatal evidence is that when alt. e. companies become large blue chips, the corporate culture takes over and the innovation goes out of the window. The question is why?

Arguably, because they have a much greater fear of failure. Silly really, when if you've read Why most things fail: evolution, extinction and economics by Paul Ormerod, you understand that failure is the natural order not only of the economy but of the biosphere. You have to budget for failure to succeed. Roughly 99.8% of all species and companies that have ever existed do not do so today. But that's ok because we have superfecundity - as Eric Beinhocker argued in a similarly excellent book, The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity and the Radical Remaking of Economics, i.e. a surplus of players in the biosphere and the marketplace who are destined to fail but in so doing provide competition, and a learning mechanism for the survivors.

So after that rather long introduction, I'd like to introduce you to three players who have emerged into the light over the last few weeks, who have very novel innovations to their name.

First of all,