Innovation Blog - UCI Paul Merage School of Business : Consumer Products, Future, Entrepreneurship

Energy Innovation: From Chocolate to Diapers

Lynda Lawrence — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:57:00 GMT

In this week’s Bloomberg Business Week, Esme Deprez highlights a few of the more innovative sources now being explored for fuel. In the wake of the gulf oil spill and the coal mining tragedy, it makes sense to look at more of these options: 1) Chocolate: a Formula 3 racecar that runs on biodiesel from chocolate waste in Britain. 2) Turkeys: diesel from bones, beaks and feathers 3) Coffee: from the 20% of grounds that are oil—comes complete with that scent of fresh-brewed java 4) Beef: Amtrak is using biodiesel from beef by-products in Texas 5) Human fat: a plastic surgeon is converting liposuction waste to power his car 6) Urine: especially from pigs, converts to hydrogen, helps with disposal 7) Manure: Every day a cow produces enough energy to power two light bulbs 8) Dirty diapers: the products and their contents yield methane and diesel oil. In fact, most of these solutions offer twin benefits: providing energy while reducing waste and emissions. Perhaps if these solutions got just a fraction of the subsidies we spend on oil and coal, they might add to the mix we need for a better future.

Deadlines and Daydreams

Lynda Lawrence — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:37:00 GMT

Reading Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, What the Dog Saw, I was struck by his descriptions of infomercial king Ron Popeil and the famous copywriter, Shirley Polykoff, who made hair coloring acceptable, and changed women’s looks for half a century. These were not middle-of-the-night inspiration people—they were hard workers who kept looking for new ideas and perfecting them for years. Or, as legendary dancer Paul Taylor says, in a profile in the New York Times, ”People think some muse comes down and strikes. Well, making a dance is just plain work like anything else. The inspiration is the deadline.” So which is it, deadlines or daydreams? Research is mixed. Real deadlines are important incentives, but too little time can stifle creative solutions. This weekend I scratched my cornea and couldn’t read. Without my daily fix of five newspapers, internet sites, weekly newsmagazines, professional journals and business books, I found myself full of ideas that had been rumbling around the back of my brain but hadn’t fully formed. Suddenly I knew how to tackle that weird transition in class, that emotional hitch in a consulting assignment, that tricky patch in a report. And then this morning in the Wall Street Journal, business book writer Pat Lencioni addressed the same issue. According to him, you need to block out creative time in every day. Even with deadlines, you’ll have better solutions if you let your mind drift, enjoying that walk or a long shower or staring out the window, instead of staring at your computer forcing yourself to THINK, DAMMIT. The truth, of course, like all things in life, is not simple. You need deadlines and daydreams, perspiration and inspiration, and the trick is finding the right balance.

Innovation as Ecosystem

Lynda Lawrence — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:35:00 GMT

In the latest McKinsey digital newsletter, Mark Marino muses that innovation is like a coral reef: nobody quite understands what causes reefs to form, but human actions can nurture or harm the process. Silicon Valley, he says, is an innovation reef, started by Dave Packard and Bill Hewitt in their Palo Alto garage during the depression — an organic, bottom-up, self-sustaining ecosystem.

And while that model has built hubs of entrepreneurial growth around Boston, Seattle, and Raleigh-Durham, it may not be sufficient to jumpstart innovation today. He argues that bottom-up strategies need an umbrella approach at the top — something like a national "innovation czar" to focus on the big picture. This czar could drive investments in renewable energy, better health care and improved education by selecting areas that are near the tipping point and funding them. Perhaps the czar could also eliminate needless regulations or address immigration policies that send our highly educated immigrants away when they'd prefer to stay here and start breakthrough companies.

Good ideas all, but likely to fall off the radar screens of a county that's struggling with recession, war, unemployment, and health care reform. Of course, it's precisely during difficult times that people try to do things better, for less. Maybe today's Dave and Bill are tinkering in a garage someplace (or on their laptops at Starbucks), and this recession will see the birth of innovation we'll need for the next growth spurt in the world economy. Perhaps tomorrow's billionaires are working on their own ideas since they can't find work elsewhere. Let's collectively hope so.

Nurturing the innovation reef.

Little Green Companies Coming to a Planet Near You

Lynda Lawrence — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 22:48:00 GMT

Business Week calls them under-the-radar start-ups in alternative energy, and warns that they may not be the ground floor opportunities that investors are seeking. What’s amazing about this list, however, is the wide range of approaches these companies are taking.

Geothermal energy. Making ice at night. Cylindrical and thin film solar cells. Wind turbines that fit on a house. Ocean and river generators. A truck-top plant to convert industrial waste to biofuel. New ways to conserve, meter, and sell energy. New ways to finance solar panels. Algae for jet fuel, and that elusive clean coal technology.

Maybe none of these will work commercially. Maybe all of them. More likely, some portion of these and others that are not on the radar screen this month will be changing the way we run our homes, offices and vehicles over the next few decades.

If any of these technologies work, we could be on the verge of a new industrial revolution—one that won’t take our depleted natural resources for granted. When everyone is busy looking backwards at how we got ourselves into this financial and environmental mess, it’s exhilarating to see how we just might find out way out.

The Next Energy Innovators, BusinessWeek