Is your Next Great Investment Hidden Away in a University?
As Joshua S. Hill wrote in our sisterblog Planetsave.com, on January 31, 2008, over 1500 universities and other organizations across the country participated in an all day teach-in about global warming solutions. Under the title “Focus the Nation”, each participating organization held a wide variety of trade-show-like fairs, panel discussions, public debates, presentation of research, and tours of buildings either built with sustainable materials or gardens planted with drought resistant plans, and much more.
I attended a pane
l at UC Davis’s “Focus the Nation” program called, “Innovation: Commercializing Science In Energy & Efficiency’. UC Davis has strong programs in many science disciplines, and there is a desire among university players and local politicians to have Davis, California (and some of the greater Sacramento area) be known as a cleantech center. I was interested to hear about what is actually being done to support green entrepreneurs.
From the panel makeup alone, you can tell that UC Davis is anything but passive in developing clean tech solutions and taking them to market.
The panel moderator, Dr. Andy Hargadon is the founding director of the UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship and the UC Davis Energy Efficiency Center. He explained that UC Davis has a fellowship program for doctoral and post-doc students to take courses in the School of Management, which played an important role in the launch of a startup clean tech company that was the focus on the panel discussion.
Synapsense was started with the help of UC staff and affiliates, based on research conducted in a lab on campus led by Associate Professor Raju Pandy who took a leave of absence from teaching to co-found the Company. SynapSense’s Wireless Green Data Center technology enables data centers, which usually consume massive amounts of energy, to reduce both energy usage and carbon emissions. Pandy had been working with graduate students on the basic research, and one of those graduate students participated in the Entrepeneurship Center’s Business Development program.
To make a long story short, that student told Entrepeneurship Center faculty that his lab was working on something that might be commercialized, and the Entrepreneurship center as well as the Energy Efficiency Center definitely were interested.
The remaining two panelists told other parts of the story of how Synapsense was started 
and moved out of a UC Davis lab. Dr. David McGee is the Executive Director of InnovationAccess, an office at UC Davis that serves as a liason between the university and the private sector. In addition to filing patents and helping with business planning, the office has a mandate to help connect private enterprise with science research. So if you are a clean tech investor, you might want to check out the InnovationAccess site linked above.
The final panelist brought in “the money” (and more I am sure). Dr. Barbara Grant is the managing director of American River Ventures and has taught at UC Davis. American River Ventures is a venture capital fund focused on companies that help reduce energy consumption as opposed to companies looking for new energy sources, which is covered by other funds.
Do you live near a university with researchers who may be focused on commercial applications for environmental research, sustainable business management, or cleantech basic research? If so, you should find out if there are programs or departments to create a link between the private sector and the academics. And if you know of these programs, please use the Comments feature below to tell other readers about them.
Inspiring. I live an hour + north of Davis, and it always surprises me to hear how much greenovation is coming out of there, in technology, in building, and more. Thanks for the update, and resources.