Embracing Innovation
The National Commission on Entrepreneurship has published a report on Entrepreneurship and American Economic Growth. The report is available as a PDF here:
When gas was thirty five cents per gallon and
Prior to the OPEC Embargo of the 1970s, Dubai was a fishing village. When our politicians were killing off the alternative energy programs during that same decade, there began a wholesale transfer of wealth out of the United States. Now that the equity draw-down is almost complete, your elected representatives want you to believe that they have the answer. They want you to ignore the fact that they are almost wholly owned and operated by those controlling the incumbent energy concerns. They want you to accept the notion that “too much dependence on foreign oil” is a new revelation as if it wasn’t the hot topic during the 1970s. Perhaps they are right and the electorate does have the attention span of a gnat. Look and see what a tenfold increase in the price per gallon of gas is buying you now.
Frictionless Fan
Pax Scientific, a US technology company, has developed a fan technology based on the logarithmic spiral found in seashells. The fan offers huge energy savings and is a great deal quieter than most other fans.
See a video explanation by Janine Benyus of the Biomimicry Guild. Watch Video
Solar Power Commercial Market
The sun has produced energy for billions of years. Solar energy is the solar radiation that reaches the earth. This energy can be converted directly or indirectly into other forms of energy, such as heat and electricity. It is used for heating water for domestic use, space heating of buildings, drying agricultural products, and generating electrical energy.
Solar energy supplies electricity to several hundred thousand people around the world, provides employment for over ten thousand and generates business worth more than one billion dollars. In the future, the pace of change and progress could be even more rapid as the solar industry unlocks its hidden promise.
The benefits of solar power are compelling: environmental protection, economic growth, job creation, diversity of fuel supply and rapid deployment, as well as the global potential for technology transfer and innovation.
The underlying advantage of solar energy is that the fuel is free, abundant and inexhaustible. The total amount of energy irradiated from the sun to the earth’s surface is enough to provide more than 10,000 times the annual global energy consumption. Yet these benefits remain largely untapped; most energy decisions today overlook solar power as a modular technology that can be rapidly deployed to generate electricity close to the point of consumption. Phasing in solar photovoltaics therefore requires a shift from centralized to decentralized power production, offering far greater control to individual consumers.
Does it pay to be green?
In manufacturing terms, exponential population growth means more factories taking up more land, using more raw materials, and allowing more emissions and waste into the environment. Demand for products and services will grow, but the availability of supplies isn’t guaranteed. Competition for Earth’s finite resources will heat up and it’s easy, yet unsettling, to imagine the socio-economic and political consequences.
A variable-speed drive saves energy that the La Union sugar mill in Guatemala is able to sell for additional revenue of $158,480 per harvest season. Source: Rockwell
A variable-speed drive saves energy that the La Union sugar mill in Guatemala is able to sell for additional revenue of $158,480 per harvest season. Source: Rockwell
“To achieve and maintain world-class sustainable manufacturing, you need continuous improvement – not just of your capital assets but the utilization and return on your raw materials, utilities and human resource assets as well,” says John Blanchard, principal analyst for CPG industries at ARC Advisory Group. “Manufacturing companies should recognize that it will become increasingly difficult for manufacturing operations to drive new growth and margin without considering manufacturing ‘sustainability’ in their business decisions.”
The benefits are practical as well as financial. Blanchard explains, “Maximizing the utilization of assets always brings a return on investment. If you can bring a packaging line from 50% efficiency to 80% efficiency without buying new equipment or using more energy, then you have reduced the cost per unit of product and demonstrated one of many approaches toward achieving world-class sustainable manufacturing.”
Carbon Trust grants £1m to boost low carbon technologies
The seven projects to receive funding from the Carbon Trust are:
* Aluminium smelting technology with the potential to reduce energy consumption by up to 20% – Coventry University
* Technology to explode paint into moulds, eliminating the need for paint shops in the manufacture of plastic components – Warwick Manufacturing Group
* Energy efficient kilns, which could reduce the energy used in the manufacture of ceramics – Horizon Ceramics
* Natural ventilation systems for large buildings with the potential of halving the energy used by conventional mechanically ventilated buildings – e-stack Ltd.
* Testing of new fully automated biomass combined heat and power unit – Biomass CHP Ltd.
* Steam trap performance sensors with the potential for reducing carbon emissions by more than 750,000 tonnes over ten years – Spirax Sarco Ltd.
* New generation of ultra bright LEDs with improved life expectancy and massive carbon savings over traditional lighting – GlowLed Ltd.
AEVIA Reveals the Source
The Entrepreneur: Bringing Innovation to Life
As the global economy continues to evolve, scientific discovery, technological invention and commercial innovation are fast becoming the hallmarks of our socioeconomic well-being. Although, transforming science into technology can be fraught with intimidating doses of hard work and hard thinking, the hard truth of the matter is that bringing technology to the marketplace is just as essential to wringing out social benefits from science and technology as the discoveries and inventions were in the first place. However, in contrast to the advanced knowledge it takes to develop new products, it takes age-old personality traits such as vision, leadership, self-confidence and intestinal fortitude to bring bright ideas to the light of day. Those among us who do the things that bring the benefits of technology to people are that separate breed of individuals we call entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs Getting Younger
They’d rather strike out on their own. In fact, nearly 71 percent of the 1,474 youth who participated in a 2006 Junior Achievement survey said they wanted to be self-employed sometime in their lives—up by 6.9 percentage points since 2004. Credit the opportunities that come from growing up in a technological society, experts said. That’s not to say there haven’t been downtrends throughout the years.
Reasons for the trend: About 3.9 percent of adults ages 20-34 started a business in 2005 and 2006, according to the Missouri-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation’s 2006 Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, up slightly from the 3.7 percent who took the plunge in 2000-2001—but down from 4.3 percent in 1996-1997.
Not many other national studies track the age of entrepreneurs, but experts agree that an increasing number of startups have young people at the helm.
Entrepreneurship Education
Schools are adding more courses and other activities to cultivate the business ideas of budding workers who are increasingly bypassing corporate jobs for their own startups.
The move to embrace this academic discipline comes as today’s college students see the business world differently than past generations. With unprecedented access to technology, students can start a business with much less capital and manpower than ever before. And after watching their parents lose jobs, pensions and other benefits over the years, many students see going out on their own as offering better opportunities and flexibility – despite the risks.
The Boomer Factor
Media reports on boomers’ march into their senior years carry a consistent theme: “Guess what, they don’t know they’re old.” Entrepreneur Magazine cites a survey from the Boomer Project (www.boomerproject.com) that found that the average 54-year-old considered himself 41. Further testing showed a psychological age of 39. Rather than believe our years are advancing, we boomers simply redefine: 60 is the new 30.
Boomers are changing old age. It’s what we do. The baby boom generation—those born during the post–World War II years 1946 through 1964—has a track record of rebellion that has caused startling cultural and social transformations, including rock’n’roll, the peace movement, civil rights, and agendas we can be less proud of. Consider “Greed is good,” a phrase that caught hold when boomers entered their peak earning years.
A Merrill Lynch survey reveals that most boomers envision working throughout retirement. It adds a new wrinkle to retirement planning, which may be more aptly described as “Next Career Planning.” Merrill Lynch’s research identifies the new retirement as “cyclical”—a blend of work that can take boomers in and out of new careers balanced with free time, continued learning, volunteerism, and travel.