Archive for Green Innovation
Amyris: A Partner in Open Innovation for Sustainable Consumer Products and Biofuels
In our ongoing work on analyzing the intellectual property landscape in biofuels, one interesting company we’ve encountered is Amyris, an integrated renewable products company. Amyris was founded in 2003 by Kinkead Reiling, Neil Renninger, and Jack D. Newman who met at Berkeley. The company is now located in Emeryville, California. With a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, they first developed their technology under a non-profit initiative to provide a reliable and affordable source of artemisinin, an anti-malarial therapeutic. It was viewed as a long-shot, but they found success that led to growth into other areas. They are now developing new microbial strains that can produce other molecules from renewable feedstocks. This industrial synthetic biology platform is providing alternatives to a broad range of petroleum-sourced products. he extremely useful molecule farnesene is an important part of their business. It provides a compound that can be used to produce flavors, perfumes, detergents, cosmetics, biodiesel, and other products.
This week Amyris announced a record number of deals and partnerships for a single week (a record among bioenergy companies, according to Biofuels Digest). These partnerships include P&G, Total, Soliance, Cosan, M&G Finanziaria, and Shell:
Amyris has taken it up a notch with a series of stunners surrounding its synthetic farsenene, which it has named Biofene – the first product that Amyris is seeking to produce at commercial scale.
Beyond its success this week with Biofene announcements, which are the basis for the P&G, M&G and Soliance partnerships — there are the broader arrangements with Cosan to develop a platform in renewable chemicals, and the equity agreement with Total that will provide needed capital as well as a broader platform for Amyris’s expansion into hydrocarbon fuels.
The mysterious agreement with Shell, regarding diesel, is one to watch. The decidedly vague disclosure was buried in Amyris’ amended S-1A registration statement, but not otherwise mentioned in a flurry of press releases from the company as it promotes its expansion in this pre-IPO environment. Shell Western Trading & Supply is one of 17 Shell trading companies that buy and sell to customers within and outside of Shell.
This news shows an interesting example of companies forming partnerships with an innovative start-up with great technology and apparently highly valuable IP. According to my Patbase search, Amyris has 21 patent families, quite a large number for such a young company. They clearly have been active and aggressive in pursuing patent protection, and those patents are critical for the meaningful partnerships they are now forming. It’s a great unfolding story of open innovation and technology transfer.
The story extends beyond the US. They have operations in Brazil, for example, which is one of the world’s hotbeds for bioenergy, bioproducts, and collaborative innovation.
Help Dad go green with these seven innovative gift ideas
With Father’s Day coming up this Sunday, I thought it would be nice to blog about all the unique “Green” gift ideas for Dad. Most of these gift ideas I found online:
1. How about a Grow Your Own Beer Garden Kit (pictured on the left), which includes the barley, hops and wheat seeds, plus a place for them to sprout, the plant stakes, gravel and decals. It costs about $25 over at ThinkGeek.
2. If your dad likes to cook, consider an oven that uses the sun for energy. You can find the Sun Oven for about $300, or you can find online directions on how to make your own sun oven with cardboard for under $40.
3. Lots of dads want to know if their household appliances are costing them more than necessary in energy costs. He can use a nifty device called the Kill A Watt (pictured on the right). He just plugs the appliance into the outlet and a meter tells him how much energy is being used.
4. What dad doesn’t like to control the remote? You might want to check into energy-saving remotes like this one over at ethicalsuperstore.com.
5. Usually a game of golf involves green in nature only. But now dads who enjoy sustainability can tee off with 100-percent recyclable golf balls by Dixon Earth. Along with being recycled, the manufacturing process of these balls use no lead, cobalt, tungsten or heavy metals. You can order a package of six dozens for $40.
6. Dads who like to hike but need a charge might enjoy this solar panel backpack over at Amazon. At $220, it’s great for powering up cell phone batteries on the trail.
7. If you or your dad is a Father’s Day traditionalist (as in neckties and wallets), How about this innovative gift idea: a wallet made out of recycled neckties and suits! Designer Laura Skelton created the outside of the wallet from discarded silk ties, and lined the inside with a solid gray material from men’s suits. They sell for $28 over at UncommonGoods.
Happy Father’s Day to all you dads out there!
Solar Success!
Solar power companies are partnering with many top corporations to help power their offices, plants and retail outlets. Copanies like Kohls, Dell, Whole Foods, J&J and Intel are using the sun and the power of strategic collaboration to save energy.
You can read up on how each of these companies is finding solar success via a voluntary program called the Green Power Partnership, and it is changing the way many Fortune 500 companies track their annual green power costs.
Clean Energy Technology: Where are companies investing?
There is a lot of buzz these days about clean energy technology and where U.S. companies are putting their money.
A few hours ago Google Inc. announced that for the first time it is making a sizable investment in renewable power as a way to accelerate the deployment of the latest clean energy technology while providing attractive returns to the search engine giant. (Read about it here.)
Google’s $38.8 million investment in an incredible wind energy project in the North Dakota plains involves two wind farms owned by NextEra Energy Resources that generate 169.5 megawatts of energy, or enough to power more than 55,000 homes.
Not every company is investing locally. One trend we are noticing is that clean energy technology has globalized and innovation has followed suit.
One nation in particular continues to reap the benefits of this trend. Companies like GM, Dow and and Intel have constructed high-tech research labs in China. In fact the Chinese have 750 foreign-funded R&D centers in China—up from 50 just 13 years ago. Meanwhile the number of R&D sites in the United States dropped from 60 percent to 52 percent in the past decade.
You can read more about this phenomenon in a new Business Week article titled America’s Green Innovation Problem. The report does a good job explaining the numbers, and showing that as many companies are becoming truly global in their R&D, manufacturing and marketing, they’ve been collaborating even more with foreign companies and governments.
Innovation Trends: Smartphones and Agriculture
One of the interesting trends in emerging nations is the rapid spread of mobile phones without first moving to landlines. Millions of people who don’t have landlines and may not have the infrastructure for them are able to benefit from cell phones. As cell phones increasingly become smart, offering a variety of apps and services, their smartphones can change the way people work and live. That includes the way they farm, including they way they apply pesticides, apply water, manage the soil, and harvest crops. Look to agriculture and the related fields of water and soil management for added value in coming years.
Lindsay Corporation (no relation) recently announced a new cell phone application to help farmers track and control their automated irrigation systems such as the Zimmatic® system. Here’s an excerpt:
Lindsay Corporation, maker of Zimmatic® irrigation systems, announces the introduction of FieldNET Mobile—pivot control for smartphones. The new feature allows growers to fully control and monitor their irrigation pivots anywhere through the convenience of smartphones.
“FieldNET Mobile provides a labor-saving innovation with the convenience of web-enabled phones,” says Reece Andrews, GrowSmart™ product manager at Lindsay. “With full control and monitoring from anywhere, growers are more efficient with their time and always know the status of their irrigation systems.”
FieldNET Mobile’s graphical interface supports most industry-leading smartphones, including the iPhone®, Droid® and BlackBerry®, according to Andrews.
FieldNET is an award-winning web-based irrigation management system. With the addition of FieldNET Mobile, growers can view the current status of all their pivots in one list, receive system alerts, arrange pivots by predefined groups, view water usage reports and receive a history of pivot runtimes.
Innovators are already considering many other smartphone-enabled opportunities for improving the way we farm and manage water around the world. We look forward to seeing what we can do to further improve the quality of life through better agriculture practices enabled by the power of smartphones. Stay tuned!
What do you see as future applications of smartphones in agriculture? Interested in working with us to explore the IP landscape and innovation opportunities here? Give us a call!
Related reading:
No need for an outlet with this battery charger
When an earthquake shook Haiti’s capital Port au Prince in January, communicating by cell phone was impossible. The cell towers high in the hills of the capital city that covered most of the island nation became inoperable. But a new palm-sized fuel cell that turns water into electricity might be a game changer in developing nations and disaster areas.
About a billion people in emerging countries have cell coverage, and those people could communicate via mobile phone very inexpensively in the near future—without the need for electricity.
A new device called the H3 charger is promising on-the-go charging even when you are away from a wall outlet. You can read about the H3 here and here.
Innovators at Stockholm-based myFC, came up with the H3 charger, which relies on portable fuel cells. I checked out their web site, and was impressed to learn the company was awarded as one of the top ten fastest growing clean tech companies in Europe at the Cleantech Connect Awards in November. (Cleantech Connect brings together Europe’s’ leaders in the clean and green technology space, recognizing growth and innovation in the sector.)
The H3 charger is nearing commercial release in Scandinavia this year and will eventually make its way to the U.S. next year. The price tag is around $40 to $50, and is about the size of a sandwich.
So if you are planning a wilderness trek next year, you’ll need some water, the charger and a few small tea bag-sized fuel packets containing hydrogen fuel. Then simply pour water into the reaction chamber, add the packet and wait for the chemical reaction between the water and the fuel pellets.
Green Innovation: Do You Have a G-Rated Business™? A White Paper from Innovationedge
Innovationedge is pleased to announce the release of a new white paper on sustainability and green strategy. The paper, “Green Innovation: Do You Have a G-Rated Business™?” is available in PDF form. It includes a brief excerpt from Conquering Innovation Fatigue, our recent book published by John Wiley & Sons. Here are the opening paragraphs:
Green Innovation: Do You Have a G-Rated Business™?
The many pressures for businesses and products to become green offer numerous opportunities for true innovation, not just in products and services but in entire business models and in the web of relationships (the “value network”) around a business. But in spite of the rich opportunities for innovation, many companies boast of being green after doing little more than adding a little recycled material to a product or package, or adding some “earth friendly” furniture to their offices.
How can a business pursue the changes and innovations needed to become really green? And what does it mean to be green?
Let’s discuss what green is, and then we’ll address approaches to green innovation.
G-Rated Business™
We recommend that companies think about green issues and sustainability in terms of becoming a “G-Rated Business™.” This concept from Innovationedge draws upon an analogy to movie ratings. For a movie to be G-rated, it needs to be free of gratuitous sex, violence, and profanity. A two-hour movie with 119-minutes of mild content can lose its G-rating for just a few seconds of material. It’s not enough to avoid graphic violence of nudity for 99% of the movie – it generally needs to be clean throughout. While we recognize that there are abundant imperfections in movie ratings, we expect a movie to be substantially free of certain content for the entire movie, not just most of it, to be G-Rated. Now if we let “G” stand for “green”, what is a “G-Rated Business™”? It’s one that seeks to be green throughout its operations, consistently, not just in selected scenes. It is one with sustainability integrated into its operations and business model at many levels.
New torch shines as example of green innovation
I spent this past weekend cheering on my favorite athletes, and looking forward to more of the same this week. Although the torch-lighting ceremony had a glitch, the world’s enthusiasm for the beloved Games shines bright.
Courtesy of Camosun College in British Columbia.
Last week I wrote about the 2010 Winter Olympics going green by offsetting carbon credits, a trend that will continue for many Olympic Games to come. The lesser-known 2010 British Columbia Games has taken energy savings to the next level with a new Olympic torch that draws less power than a household toaster!
For over 30 years the government-funded BC Summer and BC Winter Games have been promoting healthier lifestyles in Canada, and today they are one of British Columbia’s largest sporting events.
Until now the traditional torch has been burning natural gas, just like the International Olympic Torch. But this year the newly-redesigned BC Games torch is kinder to the environment, thanks to the efforts of BC’s Camosun College.
The BC Games Society asked Camosun College to design a high-tech torch with a reduced environmental impact. The Camosun School of Trades and Technology came up with a novel torch that uses LED lights to create the illusion of a flickering flame.
For the 100 days of the games the torch “burned” about 2,000 kWh of electricity and costing less than $2 a day to operate. This compares with the old natural gas torch that cost about $50 a day!
What’s more, the college and the committee used an open innovation model to make it happen. The design project required a multidisciplinary effort that included participation from many diverse design teams in electrical, mechanical and manufacturing technology .
Here are some cool facts:
- Number of LED lights used: 303
- Height and weight: 544 kg and 4.5 m tall (1200 lbs and 15 ft.)
- Green House Gasses removed from the environment: 1.5 tons
I’m sure with only 300 LED’s, the spectacle isn’t as grand as an actual flame, but who knows what may be in store for the “torch” years from now as technology continues to develop.
Going to the Olympics? Get your carbon credits!
With about a week to go before the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, it’s interesting to note that there is a green effort underway to make these events more environmentally friendly. Twenty-five partners are heading an ambitious effort to leave a legacy of carbon neutral Games by doing things like offsetting air travel for Olympians.
Those games are projected to put about 268,000 toes of carbon emissions (118,000 tons from direct emissions and 150,000 from indirect emissions), resulting from Olympic travel by participants and spectators. (These projections come from the Center for Sustainability and Social Innovation at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business.)
Corporate sponsors, governments and broadcasters are volunteering to offset some of their own carbon emissions by investing in a portfolio of British Columbia clean energy technology projects, as well as international Gold Standard offset projects. It’s called the 2010 Legacy Portfolio.
What’s more, even the Olympic Torch Relay presenting partners Coca-Cola and RBC have joined the partners in offsetting all their emissions arising from the long journey across Canada.
And if you happen to be headed for Vancouver and want to join in this green movement, you can go carbon neutral by offsetting emissions from your travel to and from the games by clicking www.offsetters.ca to calculate your carbon footprint and purchase carbon credits immediately online.
Coffee growers in Ethiopia are turning to green solutions
Ethiopian coffee growers are looking at green innovation to grow their business.
Aid agency Oxfam International is sponsoring a project to help coffee growers in one region of Ethiopia use more sustainable growing methods, teaching environmentally-friendly processing to reduce waste and cut water usage by 98.5 percent.
Photo courtesy of Oxfam
That’s welcome news of hope for coffee growers, who face increasing challenges as the climate changes. According to SciDev.net., coffee is the world’s most valuable tropical export and is produced by 20 million or so small farming families. But the future outlook for coffee growers is bleak. Coffee needs a certain climate to grow well, and as temperatures rise, unpredictable dry spells and periods of heavy rain are expected to negatively impact coffee production.
Oxfam America is increasingly investing in coffee quality improvement through greener processing. Last year the organization launched a project to support coffee quality improvement by funding the purchase of an eco-friendly coffee washing station.
As a result, coffee growers are expected to increase their income by selling washed coffee while addressing environmental pollution related to the conventional coffee processing method.
