Young entrepreneurs developing energy from waste water treatment, robots for cleaning solar panels and solar cell films with 20% more efficiency took the top prizes at the First Look West (FLoW) regional finals competition, which closed last week. At an awards celebration held at the California Institute of Technology on May 1, Stanford Nitrogen Group, Greenbotics and Xite Solar shared $200,000 in prize money.Professor Harry Atwater, Director of Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute, says “Successful competitions such as this show how universities, working with investors and the business community, are leaders in accelerating innovation flow to the real world, and in launching our future entrepreneurial leaders.”
At the Regional Awards Celebration, keynoter and Judge Andrew Chung, Partner at Khosla Ventures, captured the tone of the competition during an address that touched on the importance of thinking beyond the obvious. “Entrepreneurship shouldn’t be about extrapolating the past, but rather inventing the future,” Chung said. “Startups shouldn’t let the word of the ‘experts’ or conventional ‘wisdom’ constrain them from imagining new possibilities.”
FLoW represents the Western Region of the DOE’s National Clean Energy Business Plan Competition (NCEBPC). The winning teams from six regions across the country will now participate in the National Competition in Washington D.C., June 12 and 13, 2012. The awards event was the culmination of a six month competitive process searching for the untapped clean energy innovation that lies in American university labs. In its first year FLoW attracted 83 applicants from 34 universities across twelve states, and saw inventions ranging from new battery materials for portable electronic devices to net energy+ home kits, hydroponic farms and telephone apps for tracking energy use in the home.