After a student takes a course from IonE's Acara program for budding social entrepreneurs, then what? Do the lessons learned get filed away with old exams and term papers - or do they take on a life of their own?

Of course, each student's story is different. But for many, Acara turns out to be a springboard to new ideas, opportunities and adventures. Below is a short, informal update on some of the teams and ventures that were part of the Acara program during 2012. Whatever the path, it's clear that their experience in the Acara program gives them a solid foundation for future endeavors.

BY FRED ROSE

On Friday, May 4,  IonE was happy to host a species seldom seen in an environmental center, a venture capitalist!

Paul Matteucci, General Partner at U.S. Venture Partners in Silicon Valley, stopped by to talk to the IonE community about venture capital, and specifically, Paul's interest in the global food market.

Venture capitalists are important players in the whole innovation ecosystem. Most people probably think of them as investing in some young geeks in Silicon Valley, but they operate in many markets and industries and supply an important source of capital for new businesses. Paul, a self-described foodie, has interest rethinking the global industrial food system. He says, "The demographic models point to a peaking of the world's population below 10 billion by 2050. Getting from here to there without massive starvation and environmental damage is a major challenge for governments and businesses. But it is also an enormous opportunity for entrepreneurs, with creative ideas, to build valuable companies that address this issue."

You can understand why he was at IonE. In addition to his common interest in the global food system, he wanted to talk to faculty and graduate students about the kinds of opportunities VCs look to for new investments. It's not a path many in this part of the University always think about as an outlet for their research, so Paul wanted to plant the seed in people's mind of these kinds of investments as a way to scale some of their ideas. He talked about the types of ideas venture capitalists like - for example businesses that have the opportunity to scale. Facebook has 900 million users globally. That's interesting to an investor. A social media network scalable to just your neighborhood, not so much.

Paul also said venture capital investments are all about failure. The well known metric is that only one in 10 investments makes money. Even if that one in 10 makes a LOT of money, a couple more may do OK, and the rest don't return their original investment. And that's just the ones they invest in. There are hundreds of other plans considered and rejected for every investment made. And if you do get funding and fail, that's OK. Entrepreneurs learn from their failures (although you can't fail ALL the time). All investments have some risk. That's why the federal government is a terrible VC (see the fuss about Solyndra). Failure doesn't look good in a political setting.

Stay tuned to hear more about some other activities Paul is working on, collecting innovative ideas from across the globe around the topic of feeding 10 billion people. If you would like to read more about presenting to venture capitalists, these lecture notes from a recent talk by a VC at Stanford are interesting (a little sarcastic but interesting).

Photo courtesy of U.S. Venture Partners

Manufacturing is often perceived as a downward-spiraling one-way street: Choose raw materials with little or no consideration of the environmental or health impacts; use energy to make products from them; use more energy to distribute, market and use the products; then throw everything - whether packaging or product - away when it's outlasted its usefulness.

Wrong, Chuck Bennett told a full house at this week's Frontiers in the Environment event: "We have a system problem - the cradle-to-grave industrial paradigm."

Vice president of Earth and community care at Aveda, an international personal care products company, Bennett believes in - and pursues - a better way, based on the principles and practices made famous a decade ago by Michael Braungart and Bill McDonough in their book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way we Make Things.

The Cradle to Cradle approach, Bennett told his audience, is built on three premises:

Waste = Food

Use Current Solar Energy

Celebrate Diversity

Waste = food, Bennett said, is a matter of mimicking nature, where the products of one activity become the inputs for another. In nature's economy, he said, materials are continuously recycled; Cradle to Cradle brings this thinking to the industrial economy as well.
Using current solar energy is a matter of tapping the sun's resources now rather than relying on the limited supplies of fossil fuels. Celebrating diversity - a concept Bennett said is central to the Aveda brand - means valuing the richness inherent in biological, cultural and conceptual systems.

"All of this translates to a bigger vision for the company," Bennett said.  

Like to learn more? Check out the video of Bennett's talk, "Cradle-to-Cradle: A Design Concept Whose Time Has Come?" here.

BY SAMANTHA STEINBRING

On February 21, the NorthStar Initiative for Sustainable Enterprise hosted its first in a new series of engagement webinars aimed at exploring in depth one of the many research initiatives NorthStar is currently working on. This first webinar, "Procurement in Sustainability: from Buying Green Products to Creating Green Solutions," discussed sustainable procurement and the issues that arise as government entities and companies try to stimulate "greener" products and supply chains. The webinar evoked stimulating discussion by the three guest speakers - Tim Smith, Nancy Gillis, and Kevin Dooley. It was a successful first webinar, with over 100 registrants and 70 attendees!

The dialogue focused on a two-part hypothesis as to why innovating greener products and supply chains has been met with such difficulty. One reason pertains to the high cost of research and development that goes into creating a greener product; the other alludes to the value of the investment for the cooperating company or institution. The fundamental question the discussion boils down to is: Is it worth the effort to look for greener products?
Kevin Dooley called attention to the lack of demand for green products in the marketplace.

Currently, "green purchasing" is not a strong consumer value because the impacts of that purchasing behavior are neither highly observable nor testable. Thus, it is difficult to measure the impacts and see the visible benefits of green purchasing. Nancy Gillis proposed that other barriers in the way of greener product procurement are factors such as cost, timeliness and quality. Sustainable procurement demands high investment on the parts of both the consumer and the procurer. How can we validate this investment and bring greener products to the marketplace?

A full recording of the webinar is available on the NorthStar Initiative website. You are encouraged to continue the dialogue, ask questions, and leave feedback on our blog. Join us for our second webinar April 17, where we will be exploring "The Energy Efficiency Supply Chain: Disaggregating and Reaggregating a Saved Kilowatt Hour."
  
Photo by Nadar, used under Creative Commons license

Plans for businesses that would organize benefit dinners for good causes, convert waste into fuel, and improve the safety of street food took top honors last week at the Acara Challenge Finals, a competition held each year by the IonE-sponsored Acara program to discover and encourage international teams of student social entrepreneurs.

This year's competition involved 12 finalist teams made up of students from 10 universities and other institutions across the U.S. and India. The winning teams receive scholarships to the Acara Summer Institute in Bangalore, India, where students will refine their business plans for real-world application.

Winning projects teams and the goals of their proposed enterprises:

Gold ($1,500 cash award, up to $1,500 matching award, Summer Institute tuition and room and board for two):

Eat4Equity (University of Minnesota) - bring a community-driven model for organizing monthly benefit dinners to raise money for good causes to cities across the country. (A team from Acara's recent Winter Institute, E4E is not eligible for the scholarships, but Acara will work with the team to acquire other scholarships.)

Rot2Roti (U of M, TERI University in India) - convert compost waste from the Azadpur Mandi market in Delhi into fuel for the adjacent Shalimar Slums.

BlueFood (University of Minnesota, TERI University in India) - provide consulting and marketing services to street food vendors in Delhi communities to improve the safety of street food for consumers.

Silver ($750 cash award, up to $750 matching award, Summer Institute tuition and room and board for two)

Ujjwal (Cornell University and K. J. Somaiya Institute of Management Studies and Research, SIMSR) - address the gap in prenatal care knowledge and guidance among pregnant women in Mumbai, India.

Nirmal (Xavier Institute of Management, XIMB) - purify and remove excess iron content from drinking water.

Bronze (up to $1,000 matching award, Summer Institute tuition for two)

Renew Waste Compactor Service (University of Cincinnati and IIT Roorkee, India) - provide an efficient, profitable way to collect waste while providing income to community members.

Green Caps (Vellore Institute of Technology) - develop biodegradable lids for plastic water bottles.

Aahar (Tata Institute of Social Sciences,TISS) - improve the condition of landless marginalized poor in Odisha by allowing them to farm on leased land.

Anvita (TISS) - develop low-priced splints and distribute them in Tier II and Tier III cities in India to address disability due to amputation, paralysis or deformity.

Honorable Mention (invitation to the Summer Institute)

Food Miles (TERI University, U of M) ­ ­- mitigate the effects of food on the wallets of New Delhi consumers while increasing the income of farmers through a produce-delivery service.

Dharohar (Xavier Labour Research Institute) - provide producer groups and artisan clusters in Jharkhand with marketing linkages and training modules to enhance their skills.

Vidyut (XIMB) ­- increase processing speed and efficiency and reduce waste for post-harvest processing of chilies and turmeric.

Congratulations and best wishes to all!

What's the cleanest, cheapest and most benign source of energy available in America today?

If you guessed it's the energy we don't use, you're right on the mark. You're also right up the alley of U.S. Sen. Al Franken, who has been promoting building retrofitting as a source not only of energy but also of jobs as part of the "Back to Work Minnesota" initiative he launched last October.

Franken brought his energy- and economy-boosting ideas to the University of Minnesota last week in the form of a Forum on Energy Savings and Retrofitting sponsored by the Institute on the Environment, the Energy Service Coalition, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, the Urban Land Institute, the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce's "Minnesota Waste Wise" affiliate, the Minnesota Department of Commerce and Clean Energy Resource Teams.

"Creating jobs and cutting energy costs is a win-win situation for Minnesota and for the United States, and we badly need to do both," Franken told the more than 100 business leaders and local government officials participating in the forum. "In communities of all sizes across Minnesota, people are realizing that retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient will have both short- and long-term benefits that will more than pay for themselves over time.  By partnering with business and city leaders, we can overcome the barriers to making buildings more energy efficient."

U.S. deputy energy secretary Daniel Poneman joined Franken at the forum to speak about the federal Better Buildings Initiative, a public-private program that aims to save more than $40 billion by increasing energy efficiency of commmercial buildings 20 percent by 2020.

Dick Hemmingsen, managing director of IonE's Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment, says Franken's focus dovetails with IREE's growing emphasis on conservation and energy efficiency. The NorthernSTAR Building America Team at the University of Minnesota, supported by IREE and the U.S. Department of Energy, is bringing together researchers, builders and owners around energy conservation strategies for existing and new homes. A few additional examples of IREE-supported research include novel utility interfaces for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, a solar daylighting project and utilization of corncobs in biomass gasification systems.

Interested in learning more? View a video of last week's Franken forum here. Then check out IREE's projects database for details on these and other energy efficiency and clean energy projects.  

Photo courtesy of Al Franken