Innovation Pipeline

The planet’s oceans hold tremendous reserves of natural resources. Among those is one not-so-obvious asset: cold water. It has the potential to help cool buildings onshore in a system called seawater conditioning.
Development is moving ahead in Honolulu and San Diego. In Hawaii, a large seawater conditioning program received a $10.75 million investment by Honolulu Seawater [...]

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With the hunt for powerful energy generation innovations in full swing, there’s been some investment moving into the ocean. Let’s face it, waves and currents aren’t likely to stop anytime soon.
SRI researchers have cleverly applied a biological muscle technology to the guts of a wave generating buoy. The researchers recently demonstrated the buoy in [...]

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Named after the great American architect Buckminster Fuller, buckyballs are getting a lot of attention at Purdue University. Part of Purdue’s research is focused on the environmental impact of these ultrasmall particles.
Concerns have been expressed that release of any nanoparticles into the environment could harm the microorganisms plants, people and other animals depend on. Purdue [...]

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Pushing boundaries. That’s the modus operandi for most students on college campuses. And it takes all forms–from social to political to technological.
Judging by the discussions at last week’s Bears Symposium on the Future of Technology, that spirit is alive and well at the University of California at Berkeley.
This year’s themes and buzzwords were not different [...]

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All university research spinoffs are not created equal. Some get timely guidance and financial backing and are able to overcome the odds.
Why is that?
The Kauffman Foundation and the Max Planck Institute of Economics decided to take a look. They studied new proof-of-concept models at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of California at San [...]

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Purdue University researchers are looking to biology to do some heavy cleaning of a toxic waste site. In a collaborative project with Chrysler, researchers at the Indiana campus are planting transgenic poplar trees at a 40-year-old oil-storage facility this coming summer.
It’s not a beautification effort. The trees are capable of absorbing trichloroethylene, or TCE, a [...]

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In the past several years working farms have been looking hard at ways to modernize via technology. In Vermont, farmers are getting help from the University of Vermont Agricultural Innovations Initiative.
This past summer, Vermont farmers participated in trials to test new types of organic soybeans grown in Vermont. The farmers hope to grow organic [...]

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What do an electronic chemical-sniffing device and a glob of chemical-sensitive gel and a Star Trek tractor beam all have in common? They’re recent innovations from the lab benches of MIT. And all provide a glimpse of the future and the new generation of sensing devices that will shape personal lives and business.
The electronic nose [...]

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Startup “accelerators” borrow an idea from Simon Cowell to get early-stage innovation back in gear.
Funders of early-stage tech startups have borrowed an idea from the wildly successful Fox TV show “American Idol.” They only hope the entrepreneurs they launch stick around longer than Clay Aiken.
In a recent report titled “Finding Business Idols: A New Model [...]

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Early-stage startups can fail for a lot of reasons. Seed capital, obviously, plays a key role and some contend seed financing is now harder to come by than 10 years ago. Translation: bad news for startups.
But economists and bullish investors say the rules of capital efficiency will prevail. Which means funding will find its way [...]

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