Archive for Sustainability
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.
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.
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.
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.
Treeless paper from rocks?
Photo courtesy: unisourcegreen
Imagine a shopping bag made not of paper or plastic, but crushed stone. A new material innovation is being touted as treeless paper, and it is being manufactured in Taiwan and sold under the TerraSkin brand.
I’m familiar with the product and was interested to see this week’s Business Week article about TerraSkin, which you can read here.
The material is made from recycled calcium carbonate and polyethylene, requires no water or bleach and only half the energy that manufacturing traditional paper would use. It is said to break down when exposed to sun and humidity into a talcum-like powder.
Many companies are looking at TerraSkin to not only be environmentally friendly but save on costs. It’s not a true paper, but rather a polymer or plastic film that is water- and tear-resistant. Clorox subsidiary Burt’s Bees uses TerraSkin for soap packaging and realized cost savings by substituting a layer of the material for a sheet of wax-coated paper and a printed paper cover.
