"Constant innovation."

That's the secret of growth, says Bernard Fairman, founder and chairman of the Foresight Group, an alternative asset manager and private equity investment company.

"If you don't constantly innovate, you try to sell a business model that's past its sell-by date."

In recent years, Foresight has lived up to its name by switching its investment focus to environmental infrastructure - waste-to-energy and recycling, for example - and renewable energy.

A few years ago, the business set up Foresight Solar to specialise in solar infrastructure and became one of the first investment groups to launch a solar fund. It also own plants in Spain and Italy where it has offices in Madrid and Rome.

Bexleyheath-born Fairman, a former oil analyst with Panmure Gordon, said: "Wind is very unpredictable, solar is much more reliable."

Foresight looks after the interests of more than 16,000 individual and corporate investors and has more than £200 million under management.

Between them, its experts have more than 200 years of collective investment experience to create long-term value and high returns for shareholders.

While the business has few current links with Kent-based renewable enterprise, it expects rising demand for pelletised wood for fuel to change all that.

As a carbon neutral resource, pelletised wood is given official encouragement, and Kent's tradition of paper-making, with its ready supply of trees, makes it a potentially ideal location for production.

The fuel can be used in power stations, schools and district heating schemes. "I see it growing rapidly over the next three years," says Mr Fairman.

Its reputation encouraged the London Waste and Recycling Board (LWARB) to appoint Nigel Aitchison, industrial partner at Foresight Group, the UK's leading sustainable asset manager, to its investment committee.