Head Starts for Clean-Tech Startups

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Designed to help incubate clean-tech startups, while providing them with access to the Silicon Valley venture capital community, it is in its second year and provides $100,000 prize packages to winners in five major clean-tech categories.

Area VCs have taken notice, scouring the competition for the next big thing. "This is an unprecedented time in the clean-tech sector—with public, entrepreneurial, and capital awareness at an all time high," says Ira Ehrenpreis, general partner at Palo Alto (Calif.) venture capital firm Technology Partners, and chairman of the 2007 Clean-Tech Investor Summit.

Creating a Buzz

Organizers are hoping their competitions will help broaden the way people think about clean tech. "When you talk about clean energy, most people think of solar cell and wind. We define it as anything that allows us to use less in the way of fossil fuels," says MIT's Jim Walker, chair of Ignite Clean Energy 2007 and of the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge Energy SIG, and managing director of Energy at Global Insight. And the clean tech startups that have gotten funded, in many instances, are the ones that are efficiency improvements instead of completely new ideas, he adds.

While the California Clean Tech Open is largely made up of functioning businesses and MIT's competition is a mix of professionals and students, the University of Colorado Cleantech Innovation Challenge, also in its second year, is all about getting the next generation of business students buzzing about clean energy alternatives.

"It's partially to tell the world that there are lots of opportunities to make money while you help make the world a better place…and furthermore, it's to demonstrate these technologies work," says Thomas Dean, faculty director of the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship and professor of entrepreneurial development at the University of Colorado Leeds School of Business, who oversees the competition.

Spurring Success

Take Stellaris Corporation, a Lowell (Mass.) company founded in 2005 to develop a technology to improve solar power output by reducing optical inefficiencies while decreasing manufacturing costs. It placed second at the Colorado contest and first at MIT ICE last year. When Stellaris won the competitions, it was little more than a business plan, a great team, and a great idea, with no production facility planned or financed. The competition money, office space, and technical assistance has kept the company going for over a year while it developed its production plans and designed a production facility.

Now the company is in talks with a number of potential funding sources, finding a location for its production facility, and sourcing bids for manufacturing equipment. Thanks to the competitions, production could be up and running in late 2007, with product shipping to customers in the first half of 2008, says Tom Ward, co-founder and vice-president of marketing and sales. "The contests provided us with confirmation from industry experts that we were on the right track," he adds.

For profiles of the winners from each of the major competitions, click here for the slide show.

Jeffrey Gangemi is a freelance writer based in Mendoza, Argentina.