Resources to Find ICE Team Ideas

ICE teams generally form around someone with a business idea, whether based on a cutting edge technology (e.g., Solasta, ICE 2006), a service (e.g., Blue Sky Green Planet, ICE 2007) or novel uses of existing technology (e.g., PowerHouse Enterprises, ICE 2005).  If you don't already have an idea, you have two choices: find a team that wants your skills and that you find interesting or come up with something new.  Today's blog is for those of you without an idea right now but who want to start a team rather than join someone else.

Sources for High Tech Ideas

It's important that your high tech business is based on a technology that has patent protection since few investors will put money into a business that does not own the rights to its core invention (more about that when I can convince an IP attorney to write an expert blog on the matter).  If you've already invented something, you have a little bit of time left to protect it prior to entering the Competition (Reg Deadline is Feb 15) but if not, your best bet is to work on getting a license to an existing patent, or at least an option to license it.

There are several resources that can be used to identify intellectual property.  The US Patent Office can provide you with the full text of patents issued from 1976 to the present. Google has also developed a patent search engine that I'm told is very user friendly.  But if I were you, I'd take advantage of resources closer to home: your state's universities.  In Massachusetts, we are particularly fortunate both in the number of universities located here and a patent search portal that incorporates all the IP - updated daily - from 17 of our research institutions.  You can also access it via the MTTC website.

The Mass Tech Portal can be searched by keyword, institution or author.  It's important to be creative in your use of keywords.  Remember that until recently clean energy hasn't been a popular area of research for decades so you may need to use a term like "efficient" rather than "energy" in order to find something.  Also bear in mind that seemingly unrelated technologies can be applied to clean energy, such as sensors that can be incorporated into a system that optimizes energy use or neural networks that can be used to manage complex energy management systems.  I know one scientist who got funding from the National Institute of Health for his energy work because the technology had implications in chemistry - finding the right keyword for that technology would be tricky if you didn't know what you were looking for ahead of time.

People are already working in these areas - I didn't say that I was a great source of new ideas!  But you get the picture: try to broaden your view when thinking about energy.  We can't do anything without using energy in some way, so think about a problem you care about and that you think a lot of people might care about, brainstorm terms that might be related to it, and then do your search that way.

Instead of using the Mass Tech Portal, you can also go directly to your favorite university's Technology Transfer Office (also called Technology Licensing Offices, Offices of Technology Commercialization, etc.).  Not all schools have one, so in that case you need to do more footwork (or at least webwork) by visiting laboratories and departments to find out who is working on what.  For those schools that do have TTOs, most if not all will welcome serious inquiries.  After all, it's their job to determine which technologies should be patented and negotiate licensing agreements. 

But don't waste their time: do some homework as with the Mass Tech Portal so you can come in prepared to talk intelligently about what you want.  I'll never forget that in the first year of the ICE Competition, I approach the Tech Transfer Office of a major research university and asked for information about any patents they had related to energy and was told "We have none".  The fact is, they did have energy technologies patented but thought of them in terms of other aspects of the invention and so the automatic reaction was "sorry, no".  Thus, the better an idea you have of what problems you'd like to be solving, the better your chances of finding an appropriate patent.

Services and Low Tech Businesses

Bleeding edge technology is exciting and has the best chance of being an IPO success story.  It also has the best chance of crashing and burning when an insurmountable technical obstacle is encountered or someone else finds a better way to do the same thing faster and cheaper.  It's usually expensive, risky and, depending on the technology, slow.  Only a tiny fraction of new businesses are funded by Venture Capitalists, so if you can develop a new business that can be bootstrapped because it doesn't require huge amounts of capital and/or is based on proven technology, you are looking at less risk and quicker revenue.  Such a business is not likely to have the rapid growth and 10x return on investment in 3 - 5 years that VCs look for, which is great if you don't care for roller coasters but not so good if retiring rich in less than a decade is your primary motivation (the latter is not a motivation I recommend for starting a company). 

In general, this kind of business can't be protected by patents, so you have to have other ways to protect it from competition.  There are many ways to do this but it is more challenging than having a suite of patents.  You can be a first mover in the market and have a strategy of continuous innovation (though you'd better have a very good response to the question of why someone bigger and richer than you couldn't do the same thing); you can have trade secrets; you can secure critical partnerships in a niche market. 

If I have convinced you that you don't have to have a cutting edge technology to start a competitive business in clean energy, let's talk about idea sources.  My best suggestion is to just look around.  What is being done in some inefficient way that you could do more efficiently, cheaper and better?  What novel way do you have to make it easier for the average American to use less energy?  The average business?  What parts are most difficult for solar module installers to get, and can you develop a co-op to enable contractors to buy them more cheaply?  Are there technologies that make no sense for applications with access to the electric grid but could solve a pressing problem off it, either in the developed or the developing world?

We use more energy per capita than just about anywhere else in the world.  That's partly because our wealth and infrastructure enables routine use, but it's also because we waste a lot of it.  With energy prices climbing, anything you can do to cut a homeowner's or company's utility bills would have a potential market, provided it made sense economically.

Basic Advice

No matter whether it is high tech, low tech or service-oriented, whether it looks like it will be the next Google or the next local success, the most important aspect of the business and team you create is that you care about them.  If you are only driven by money, that's fine... but I guarantee you when you have another cash cliff looming in the future and the experiments aren't working, it's a lot easier to stay excited and motivated if you have a passion for the idea.  Don't let it blind you to its faults: a company or product based on technology push is much tougher to sell than those based on market pull.  But do get your inspiration from what you want your company to contribute to the world.  And then figure out how it is going to earn gobs of revenue in the process. 

That advice is a little bit "Mom and Apple Pie" as you've probably heard it a million times before.  And you should take it with a grain of salt from someone who has left corporate and startup life to work in a government office.  But in the half-dozen jobs I've had, the ones for which it was easy (most days) to get out of bed were always the ones I believed in passionately, and that goes for my current job, too, in which I coach dozens of entrepreneurs each year in making investor pitches. 

Good luck!  And let us know what you think.