It’s called the Food & Beverage 2011: Sustainable Innovation Summit, and it’s happening in Chicago August 9 and 10. This invitation-only event will bring together the top 100 innovation leaders from a multi-national audience of Chief’s, VP’s, Directors, Heads, Senior Directors and Managers of Innovation, R&D, Product Development, Open Innovation, Customer Management, and Manufacturing. My company, Innovationege, is proud to team up once again with the outstanding leaders at the Management Roundtable for this exclusive event.

We’re going to talk about everything from our changing regulatory landscape to the search for new market channels. We’re going to hear from leaders about those amazing innovation journeys, like how H.J. Heinz developed an interesting approach to honing their capability to deliver growth by identifying, developing and acquiring a continuum of incremental and disruptive technologies! Or how the J.M. Smucker Company quadrupled in size via a strategy of growth through acquisitions, and the choices they needed to make as a result.

And we’re going to challenge current thinking and approaches, set the stage for new trends in sustainable innovation and create a senior level networking community for ongoing support and dialogue. There are 100 spots open, and if you’d like to be a part just let me know. You’ll find all of the information about our keynotes, candid case studies, facilitated Q&A, networking sessions and a post-conference workshops on our Sustainable Innovation Summit site, where you can register and check out the facilities at Chicago’s Allerton Hotel.

I’ll see you in Chicago!

Courtesy: Wikicommons

I’ve been spending a lot of time in San Diego lately, doing some teaching as well as learning! San Diego is known for many things: Beautiful weather, its biotechnology industry and of course the San Diego Zoo. As the keeper of the world’s largest collection of plants and animals, San Diego Zoo is working to develop collaborative efforts with national companies and organizations.

These days the city of San Diego is partnering with its zoo to see how they can stimulate an industry many Americans are just now hearing about: Biomimicry.

Biomimicry or biomimetics is the examination of nature, its models, systems, processes, and elements to emulate or take inspiration from in order to solve human problems. The term biomimicry is from the Greek words bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate. San Diego is trying to become a center for biomimicry by stimulating the industry and creating a hub for biomimicry research.

This makes an incredible amount of sense to those of us in the innovation industry. Innovative ideas have long been inspired by what we observe in nature, and I believe that what we can observe from animals in particular can give us insight into brand new inventions and technology.

The San Diego Zoo is bringing the 2011 Biomimicry Conference to its city in two weeks, and will offer the opportunity for attendees to consider how nature can play a huge part in innovation, and how biomimicry will transform many industries.

Interestingly, the two-day event is presented by mirasol®, a display innovation by Qualcomm. The local wireless giant recently commercialized a new type of display technology based the reflective properties of Morpho butterflies! The displays consume less battery power and makes it easy to see in daylight—just like the vibrant butterflies that inspired the innovation.

Check out the details of the conference here. I think biomimicry has the potential to be a key driver of innovation as well as an economic game-changer.

Photo courtesy of Yanko Design

I’ve been following green concepts over the years, and I’m always excited to see trends in energy power that will eventually make it into our hands someday. Or in this case, onto our fingers!

This innovative idea is a concept from the minds of two designers, Song Teaho and Hyejin Lee. Their new finger battery could one day be good news for those of us who are continually in need of a smart phone battery boost: A prototype mobile phone with a battery you can charge with a simple twirl of your finger.

The kinetic energy generated by the twirling motion powers the charge and would allow users to energize their cells.

It does take some coordination thought. The designers say you need to twirl for 130 rotations around your finger to generate about two minutes of talk or 25 minutes of standby power.

Perhaps there will come a day when we don’t have to expend quite that amount of effort. But it does give me hope that great minds are continually thinking of ideas for clean and green energy!

This photo is one of many you’ll want to check out on the AllCarsElectric site. It’s a concept car that will hopefully be in production someday. It is aerodynamic, futuristic and downright cool in my opinion. Nissan says it gets 150 MPC (miles per charge),but no word yet on the price one of these might cost. The 2011 Geneva Motorshow opens March 11.

Here’s a video of the ESFLOW concept car:

Photo courtesy allcarselectric.

Graham Hill launched the contest back in October and promised entrants that he not only would pay for the winning design, he’d live in it.  The public was asked to design a fully functioning living space in a tiny New York apartment, complete with room for a sit-down dinner for a dozen people, space for two guests, a home office, a hideable kitchen and a bed, shower and bike storage.

Hill says he wanted consumers to think about how much we really need in terms of space and stuff. The contest was designed to inspire architects and others to think environmentally by reducing their eco-footprint. Hill received 304 submissions, 600,000 entry views and thousands of comments on his website.

The winner’s design is titled, One Size Fits All. Check it out, along with the photos from the runners up here.

Today’ savvy “green” consumers are paying attention to the green marketing being pitched at them–everything from online data storage services, cookware and pet food are jumping on the eco-bandwagon. But consumers aren’t buying everything green they see. This year the Federal Trade Commission will revise its environmental marketing guidelines to combat something now called “Greenwashing,” or the misleading information and environmental benefits of products or practices many companies have advertised.

Consumers do look for these products as they become more and more caring of the environment, but they still want products that do the job. It isn’t good marketing to sell an environmentally-friendly dish detergent that leaves spots and streaks. According to trendwatching.com, this is the year that people are looking for “eco-superior” products.

Quality also needs to last. A cheap disposable product has a short life cycle, and may give off a chemical gas as it sits in the landfill. Many people are embracing antiques and locally-made items like clothing and furniture. These products may last longer, but often cost a little more.

Photo courtesy www.groasis.com

Imagine being able to grow trees anywhere in the world–including the desert. The AquaPro company developed the Groasis waterboxx, and it has indeed turned out to be one of the most innovative system of 2010. The waterboxx allows trees to grow in dry lands by providing a reservoir for roots with a sustainable water system that can last decades. Popular Science Magazine just named the waterboxx No. 1 in its Best of What’s New in 2010, and it’s no wonder.

With just a one-time fill of four gallons of water, the system surrounds a newly-planted sapling and prevents against evaporation, pests and other elements that can kill saplings before they’ve had a chance to mature.

The system was tested in the Sahara Desert and costs only a dollar per tree, making it affordable enough for those in poor nations. Check out this video on the Groasis waterbozz:

Many of these new kit-style classrooms can save up to 30 percent in materials costs. One builder says its structures are about $40 to $50 per square feet as opposed to new construction at $250 to $300 per square foot. And they’re actually quicker and easier to construct. Modular classroom contractors say there is typically a two- to -four-month install time.

Many contractors turn the project into a lesson in green technology, as students learn why a greener school is better for their community and the environment. Some of these classrooms are said to generate enough solar energy to be 100 percent sustainable. Check out Project Frog classrooms in San Francisco and the Gen7 from American Modular Systems.

At the moment most of these schools are being built in southern climates like California and Florida. But some in the U.K. are able to withstand cooler temps. No doubt we’ll be seeing more of these eco-friendly moduals coming to school as the younger population increases.

(Photo courtesy of American Modular Systems)

The photo looks like something out of this world, doesn’t it? It’s not by coincidence that the shape of the car resembles a leaf. The word Yez is actually Mandarin for leaf.

The car is produced by a little-known company, SAIC, which stands for Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation. SAIC is GM’s partner in China.  A few months ago SAIC showed off this innovative concept car which uses photovoltaic conversion, wind energy conversion and CO2 absorption to generate it’s power.

Even the wheels are energy efficient, acting like small wind turbines to capture and convert wind energy into electricity. I particularly like how its roof is filled with solar cells that can find the sun’s in the sky and then rotate to produce the maximum energy-absorption.

At the moment this is just an idea. The auto company says it is definitely something to shoot for in the future, but is for now far off from reality.

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.

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.

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™?

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.

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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.

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.