Emergence of Cleantech as an Investment Category - Public Discourse and Venture Capital Investment

Abstract

In our paper we observe with an extensive database of press articles about venture capital the emergence and following evolution of the topic clean technology investing. We match our software-based analysis of the press discourse with investment data and observe high synchronicity of the developments of the two datasets. We demonstrate that historical textual information holds as a viable proxy for analyzing circumstances with a lack of rich data. An industry life cycle model can be applied to the development of this investment category. Additionally we develop an understanding of the role of public discourse in the venture capital industry and look at consequences of tone and sentiment in the media data.

Keywords: Clean Technologies, Venture Capital, Emergence, Industry Life Cycle, Public Discourse, Quantitative Content Analysis, Sentiment