4 minutes with…Gerald Kutney, Managing Director, Sixth Element Sustainable Management

Tell us about your organization and it’s role in the advanced bioeconomy.

Sixth Element Sustainable Management is a boutique consulting firm specializing in commercializing innovation and evaluating the business preparedness and commercial potential of technology developers and their projects, with particular focus on sustainable enterprises, especially bioenergy and biofuels.

Tell us about your role and what you are focused on in the next 12 months.

Increasing the commercial success rate of bioenergy ventures.
Preventing entrepreneurs from making common mistakes of new ventures.
Providing strategic, operational, business development, and administration leadership, business and financial planning, financing strategies and risk analysis

What do you feel are the most important milestones the industry must achieve in the next 5 years?

Commercial successes.

If you could snap your fingers and change one thing about the Advanced Bioeconomy, what would you change?

Stop new ventures making exaggerated statements as to their stage of commercial development and that there are going to build several plants over the next several years

Of all the reasons that influenced you to join the Advanced Bioeconomy industry, what single reason stands out for you as still being compelling and important to you.

I think that there will be a green future, not with fossil products, and that we have to renovate the farm and their products.

Where are you from?

Born Montreal, lived across Canada, now in Ottawa

What was your undergraduate major in college, and where did you attend? Why did you choose that school and that pathway?

Chemistry – University of Toronto

What 3 books would you take to read, if stranded on a desert island?

Carbon Politics and the Failure of the Kyoto Protocol

What books or articles are on your reading list right now, or you just completed and really enjoyed?

Carbon Politics and the Failure of the Kyoto Protocol