cryptogon.com

Sweden’s Ikea may need to super-size its shopping carts. The furniture retailer unveiled an investment group today to put €50 million into cleantech startups over the next five years, with the eventual goal of seeing solar panels and other clean technologies on sale in its stores or used by Ikea suppliers.

Ikea GreenTech plans to focus on five areas — solar panels, alternative light sources, product materials, energy efficiency, and water saving and purification. The group said the investments will be made in companies that offer commercial prospects within a four to five year horizon.

“We’re already talking to companies,” Johan Stenebo, managing director of Ikea GreenTech, told the Cleantech Group. He said Ikea is likely to make its first investments this year. “That’s certainly our aim to make happen.”

Stenebo said the cleantech products will follow the same guidelines as the company’s other products.

“Really low prices, and they should be of very good quality. That’s the only thing we look at, we would never look at anything else, we would discard anything else that doesn’t fall into those boundaries,” he said. “Whether it’s home furnishings or it’s greentech products.”

Over the next two years, Ikea plans to work with five or six companies, with a target of bringing the first products to market within three to four years, helping the startups reduce their prices and develop better products.

Ikea expects to invest in five to 10 companies overall, keeping the portfolio relatively small so it spend a lot of time with the startups.