Demos Helsinki’s Smartup Manifesto looks at the next generation of startups. Smartups are startups that help free their users from the inefficient use of resources. A new wave of high impact startups is emerging from consumer cleantech.

”Smartups generate a cloud for physical asset reallocation via the digital sphere.”

”News this year: Google to Buy Nest Labs for $3.2 Billion; Uber Sets Valuation Record of
$17 Billion; Airbnb Might Soon Be Worth $10 Billion, Valued More Than Hyatt Hotels; Opower Shares Soar in IPO. There is something intriguing going on in the world of startups – the biggest and most interesting new companies, like Airbnb, Uber, Opower, BlaBla car, Sidecar, Scoot Networks, Swap.com, Piggybaggy and many more, are all of a different and very particular breed.

We’ve started calling these companies smartups. They drive a convergence of the physical and the digital. This new breed of startup is among the first to bring online interaction into the material world.

The emergence of services and technologies in the intersection of physical and digital changes both. Rather than everything being digital or physical, everything becomes something else. This “something else” is currently being defined by smartups. Most physical services and goods such as housing, transportation and automotive can’t be replaced by digital to the degree that communications and entertainment once were. Facebook and other similar services can be said to have replaced postal services and media to a degree, but Smartups are combatting one of the grand challenges of human kind: the rebound effect. Due to climate change and natural resource scarcity, resource efficiency has been recognized as a key goal for new high-impact business. Resource efficiency is not new – it provides a competitive advantage in many fields, such as construction, energy production, and manufacturing of machines and devices. Despite considerable progress on many fronts, energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase globally. This is due in part to the rebound effect, which means that effective production makes products more affordable, thereby increasing consumption.

This is why a shift towards sustainable lifestyles is required. Smartups are startup companies that facilitate this shift.”

Download the whole Manifesto from here:

SmartupManifesto_DemosHelsinki