Wiliam F. Wescott

VP Innovation - Americas, Veolia Environnement

Bill is Vice President, Innovation – Americas for Veolia Environnement, the world’s largest environmental services provider. He works closely with Veolia’s worldwide research and innovation group and all four of Veolia’s business divisions (water, waste, energy management, public transportation), to source clean technology innovation through strategic initiatives such as the Veolia Innovation Accelerator www.via.veolia.com. He is particularly passionate about creating sustainable cities, and has worked with local and regional governments around the world to this end.

Bill is an internationally recognized sustainability expert with extensive experience in environmental control technologies, information/communication technologies, climate change, new venture development, and organizational governance in the public sector and across industrial sectors. A lifelong intra- and entrepreneur, Bill has worked with startups, corporations and investors to create new cleantech ventures and assess cleantech opportunities. He has served as an advisor to organizations including the Romanian (member of the delegation to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro), Italian, Mexican, Brazilian, and U.S. governments, UNIDO, the Sustainable Performance Group Investment Fund, PROPEL Board of Directors, The Conference Board, The Pew Center on Global Climate Change, The Institute of the Americas, and the World Resources Institute. Bill was an environment, health and safety consulting director at Arthur D. Little, Inc. where he worked for 15 years with over 100 clients across all sectors on 5 continents and in 4 languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian).

Bill has a Ph.D. in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon and BSE in Chemical Engineering from Princeton.