Comment Last week, GE announced its $200 million contest, the GE Ecomagination Challenge: Powering the Grid.
The GE Ecomagination Challenge is “a call to action for businesses, entrepreneurs, innovators, and students to share their best ideas and come together to take on one of the world’s toughest challenges — building the next-generation power grid to meet the needs of the 21st century,” according to the contest’s website.
GE is promoting the Ecomagination Challenge with other venture capitalist partners, including Kleiner Perkins, Emerald Technology Ventures, Foundation Capital, and Rockport Capital.
The Challenge encourages entrepreneurs, start-up companies, and technologists to share their proposals in three categories: the smart grid, renewables, and eco homes and buildings.
Participants may enter as many ideas as they wish within the three categories over a ten-week period, from July 13 to September 30, 2010.
Entries must include a detailed proposal of a smart grid technology that is both innovative and proprietary.
"Innovation is the engine of the global effort to transform the way we create, connect and use power," GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt said during the unveiling of the Challenge on July 13.
“ … This challenge is about collaboration and we are inviting others to help accelerate progress in creating a cleaner, more efficient and economically viable grid. We want to jump-start new ideas and deploy them on a scale that will modernize the electrical grid around the world."
Entrants and visitors to the website can view, comment on, and vote for promising ideas. The candidates for a commercial relationship with GE will be judged by a committee made up of GE and partner representatives.
The best ideas will be then go on to be judged by a panel made up of GE execs, Challenge advisor Chris Anderson (Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine),and leading technologists and academics who can provide input on the proposals.
Five ideas will be offered the opportunity to work with GE and to expand and execute their ideas, as well as receive a $100 thousand Innovation Challenge award. These select entrants will have the chance to develop a commercial relationship with GE through:
- Investment: the $200 million capital pledge of GE and its partners will be invested globally into promising start-ups and ideas
- Validation: evaluate entrant's business strategy through in-depth discussions with GE's technical and commercial teams
- Distribution: explore partnership opportunities with GE to scale a business and create global reach
- Development:: leverage GE's technical infrastructure and GE Global Research Centers to accelerate technology and product development
- Growth: explore opportunities for utilizing existing GE customer to take Challenge products to market
"The Smart Grid is a new platform and a new market that is just beginning to be explored. Great ideas on how to do this can come from anywhere, so this competition is designed to tap the widest possible range of innovators, from big companies to entrepreneurs to students," Anderson commented last week in San Francisco when the Challenge was announced.
Visit GE’s website for more information on how to enter an idea, as well as check out proposals from others around the world.
Brigid
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