Savvy energy outfits are amid those businesses with a silver-lining potential for success amid the pinch. Here’s the formula they—and possibly you—should come

By Scott D. Anthony, David S. Duncan and Richard N. Foster

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For companies passionate about growth and innovation, the unprecedented market events of the last two months assume to portend nothing but dark clouds. As fiscal titans fail Wall Street trembles, Main Street freezes, consumers extreme, and everyone seems to hesitate while waiting for stability to return. The notion that novelty must be entering a period of dormancy seems inevitable.

We disagree. As an analogy, consider the personal estate of a raging forest fire. Sure, in that place is destruction, but the taint left behind is fertile, helping to create the nearest generation of giants. Fires can carry off dead wood-land and tangled encounter that constrained pullulation. Plants requiring direct sunlight can prosper.

Similarly, we see at in the smallest degree three categories of companies that should see a silver lining amid today’s economic conditions. Each can do good to from formation strategic moves that build onward their unique advantages.

1. On-the-Brink Attackers Innovators that wish been quietly circling the fringes of a market can take advantage of stumbling giants to burst into the mainstream. For example, as the dot-com bubble burst and the September 11 terrorist attacks left most companies catching their breath in 2000 and 2001, disrupters like Google (GOOG), Netflix (NFLX), Ryanair, and the University of Phoenix—which is owned by the Apollo Group (APOL)—surged.

As these companies have begun to level off, it’s natural to ask about the next wave of attackers that could thrive in today’s downturn. One assemblage to keep watch and ward: clean-tech companies that are following disruptive approaches like those of Enernoc (ENOC), First Solar (FSLR), Konarka, and Better Place (although Enernoc and First Solar have seen reposit price declines of 90% and 60% this year, particularly). Larger companies employing disruptive strategies based on low price points, such as General Electric’s (GE), by its low-cost ultrasound device, should also hit a sweet spot in today’s market.

Businesses onward the brink of breaking from one side can improve their chances of success by focusing upon strategies shared by the most successful disrupters. One critical component: making sure that decisions about product doing thresholds and trade-offs are driven by a laser-sharp focus without ceasing how the customer defines quality. In tough times, is it vital part to avoid over-engineering products in ways that are meaningless to customers, the equivalent of adding a 53rd button to a secluded control.

The tightening up of capital markets also reinforces the mantra of the most successful disrupters to be "patient for growth and impatient for profits" to buy delivery for repetition. One way to do this: testing critical assumptions in low-cost ways in the same state considered in the state of virtual prototypes, online market exploration, or Internet-based distribution.