After taking a hard look at RMI and at the rapidly changing state of the world, we are embarking on our most ambitious project yet: to "Reinvent Fire" and drive the profitable transformation off fossil fuels to efficiency and renewables.
Since the vast majority of fossil-fuel use occurs in four sectors—buildings, utilities, transportation and industrial processes—those areas will comprise our primary focus.
While this work will challenge RMI to build new strengths, our roadmap is strong, having been built upon a foundation of thought leadership and qualified success in creating change. These strategic elements form the core of how we plan to make this game-changing initiative a reality.
We aim to speed the global shift from coal and oil to efficiency and renewables
Harnessing the awesome power of fossil fuels created wealth and opportunity with a global scope once unimaginable, but also created great and rising challenges in security, economy, and environmental degradation. These interlinked challenges comprise the pivotal issue of our generation—perhaps of our species. Shifting from fossil fuels to superior alternatives is our collective imperative and Rocky Mountain Institute’s strategic focus.
We accelerate the profitable transformation of vital energy-consuming industries.
Our strong track records and relationships in these four sectors will serve us well. So will our unique insights into how to save and displace fossil fuels more cheaply than buying them. We will help these industries understand and capture the diverse and exceptional value of energy effi ciency and renewables, achieving shared goals even if for differing reasons.
We build sector roadmaps and drive initiatives to achieve these goals.
Building on our successful start in implementing "Winning the Oil Endgame", we are dedicating much effort to laying out attractive transformation paths for each targeted sector. Concrete and actionable, these roadmaps will be continuously tempered and improved by verification and collaboration with outside experts and clients. We are also concentrating our efforts in ambitious, wide-ranging strategic initiatives to catalyze lasting, critical change.
We engage leaders and stakeholders capable of transforming industries.
Ultimately, it is the leaders of commerce, civil society, and government who will choose lasting change. We seek to shape their choices by showing how to succeed in a new energy economy. A pivotal shift in this strategy will be our increased focus on amplification, to not only prove the value of important innovations, but also help take them quickly to scale.
We align our people and processes to maximize the impact of our work.
Our ambitious aims call for a new way of designing and operating the Institute. Every internal process, from our financial chart of accounts to training of new staff, is evolving. We are merging our specialty-centered teams into an integrated practice to bring an integrated, cross-sector, whole-system approach better matched to the challenge.
Our funding strategy reliably supports institutional and programmatic activities.
RMI has traditionally leveraged donor funding to drive thought leadership, and client funding to prove our concepts in real-world engagements. We are increasing the proportion of donor funding to allow for more robust research and thought leadership, and are therefore integrating our practitioners more closely with our Development team. We will continue our tradition of carefully targeted client-funded engagements, but we also expect to engage more closely with powerful for-profit practitioners in order to rapidly scale key innovations.