National Innovation Systems
“What does it take to innovate? Building capabilities to drive and enable technology innovation”. National innovation systems play an important role in driving, enabling, and sustaining innovation and achieving the Paris Agreement goals. The event explors key pillars of innovation systems, discusses roles of governments, the private sector, universities, and financiers as centers, including the roles of incubators, accelerators, and international collaborative RD&D. The panel discusses what it takes to go beyond silos and departmental thinking and deliver integrated, on-the-ground solutions and showcases examples of successful innovation systems.
Moderator: Peter Schniering | Founder | FCA
Peter Schniering is the Founder and CEO of Future Cleantech Architects. He has been working on accelerating cleantech innovation ever since completing a PhD on “Climate Policy and Technology” at Bonn University and has served as consultant to both the UNFCCC Secretariat in Bonn and the International Energy Agency in Paris, working on topics from hydrogen infrastructure to carbon capture and storage (CCS). Peter is part of an industrial SME’s management team and serves as Advisory Board Member to the World Economic Forum’s Sustainable Energy Innovation Panel. He regularly publishes articles on energy innovation topics and has been supporting the expert panel of the Solar Impulse Foundation since 2018. At the World Economic Forum, he also served as Evaluation Board member to the Sustainable Energy Innovation Fund (SEIF).
Daniele Violetti | Senior Director Programmes Coordination, Director a.i. for Means of Implementation Division | UNFCCC
Daniele Violetti is the Senior Director of the Programmes Coordination and Director a.i. of the Means of Implementation (MoI) Division. As Senior Director he provides strategic direction and oversight in relation to the work of the Programmes Department, comprised of the four Programmes divisions. Prior to his current position, he served as Chief of Staff of the secretariat for seven years, supporting two Executive Secretaries. He was also Coordinator for the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing (AGF) at the United Nation Headquarters in New York. He has extensive experience on issues related to the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) under the Kyoto Protocol and he served as Secretary to the CDM Executive Board (EB).
Martina Lyons | Associate Programme Officer – Innovation and End-use sectors | IRENA
Martina has over 10 years of experience in the private and the public sector focusing on clean energy policies and programmes. Martina previously worked in consultancies in Prague and Brussels, and the European Commission where she led strategies for the international cooperation in clean energy RD&D and played a key role in the process of getting the European Union to join the Mission Innovation. In March 2019, Martina joined the IRENA’s Innovation and Technology Center in the US and then Germany where she works on 3 workstreams: tracking the impacts of innovation; decarbonization pathways for the end-use industry sectors; and the critical materials for the energy transition. Martina has degrees in finance and law and environmental management.
Ben Santhouse | Researcher | Oxford
Ben is an MSc Energy Systems student at Oxford University. Professionally, Ben has worked with Slaughter and May on environmental law, with BMW on circular economy policy, and with Macquarie Group on low-carbon principal investing. He will join McKinsey & Company in November, working on sustainability strategy, climate finance, and carbon risks. Ben’s research primarily focuses on negative emission technologies and hydrogen. He is also co-founding a company as a platform to help provide a “one-stop shop” for distributed energy resources (DERs) (e.g. home solar, battery storage, etc.) to increase public participation in the energy transition and minimise the “hassle factor” of energy ownership.
Dietram Oppelt | Managing Director | HEAT
Dietram Oppelt is an expert in climate policy with over 30 years of experience. He is managing director of the climate consultancy HEAT, member of the UNFCCC Technology Executive Committee (TEC). He follows international climate negotiations and has participated as part of the German climate delegation at COP25 and COP26. He has advised many countries on their national and sectoral climate strategies, particularly with regards to sectoral policies in the heating, cooling and buildings sector, climate neutral cooling strategies as part of National Cooling Plans and industrial decarbonization strategies in the steel and concrete sectors. Dietram has worked on climate policy assignment in more than 30 countries in over 100 projects.
Eduardo Noboa | Senior Climate Change Specialist | BMW Foundation
Eduardo Noboa is Senior Climate Change Specialist at BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt and Scientific Advisor in Sustainable Urban Transitions at the University of Hamburg. He has nearly 20 years of experience in the field of sustainable enegry and energy transitions and facilitates multi-actor partnerships for building transformative capacities, co-creation of solutions, and mobilisation of resources towards climate-positive transformation.
From 2013 until 2016 Eduardo was Representative of Latin America and the Caribbean to the Technology Executive Committee of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.