Capturing the Innovative Spirit of Spring
May 13, 2024 4:43 PM
An Executive Note from Trienens Institute Faculty Affiliate Omar Farha covers Northwestern's decarbonization efforts this spring
Green Entrepreneurship with INVO and the Trienens Institute
The Trienens Institute and the Office for Innovation and New Ventures (INVO) facilitate partnerships to commercialize climate technology within and beyond campus
Jenna Spray | May 14, 2024
“Sometimes discovery is directed, but often it is also serendipitous and requires a culture of innovation,” said Demetria Giannisis, Senior Managing Director, Paula M. Trienens Institute for Sustainability and Energy, addressing a room of graduate students, industry practitioners, and cross-university partners Tuesday evening. “Creating a community that fosters exploration is essential to scaling solutions and discovery – at the pace of innovation needed for climate change mitigation and adaptation.”
Giannisis opened the commercialization-focused event, which was hosted with Northwestern’s Office for Innovation and New Ventures (INVO), to communicate the vast array of entrepreneurship opportunities available across the two organizations. The event featured guest speaker Kathryn Meng, investment director at RA Capital Management’s Planetary Health division. Meng provided an industry perspective on what kinds of university-incubated sustainable technology investing opportunities exist.
INVO and the Trienens Institute have developed a partnership that is key to promoting and supporting emerging climate technology stemming from Northwestern. In addition, Trienens Institute faculty affiliates have a long history of collaborating to catalyze sustainability and energy innovation, with INVO providing counsel and resources that are central to commercializing Northwestern innovators' work.
A Sustainability Success Story
The value of external engagement across a technology’s lifespan has many layers—interaction across disciplines and expertise can facilitate education around customer needs and market potential, leverage niche expertise, foster the right investment at the right time, and improve the return on investment of patent investments. The partnership between the Trienens Institute and INVO leverages INVO’s core expertise and applies it across sustainability and energy themes.
In 2023, the Institute received its largest philanthropic contribution, part of which was earmarked for a translational fund to be shared between the Querrey Incubation Lab and the Institute. INVO has since begun to identify and support more climate and sustainability technology that, over a short period of time, can grow into a startup.
“The criteria we use to evaluate potential projects is threefold: the idea must be built on existing intellectual property at Northwestern, we should be able to identify a direct and obvious impact, and there should be an identifiable milestone that the funding is key to enabling,” said Lisa Dhar, vice president, INVO.
Most recently, INVO and the Trienens Institute collaborated with faculty affiliate John Torkelson, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering, to commercialize the high-value applications of his 2022 synthetic polymer waste . Torkelson’s project was initially funded by the Department of Energy, then supported by the Trienens Institute due to its clear benefit to sustainability goals.
“We’re interested in making the unrecyclable, recyclable,” Torkelson said to the group. His presentation highlighted the successful collaboration between himself, INVO, and the Trienens Institute, leveraging one- or two-step chemistry to transform materials, like tires and mattresses, that were previously considered impossible to recycle due to permanent crosslinks into temporarily recyclable with crosslinks that temporarily exhibit dynamic character at the reprocessing condition.
“Some of the preliminary work around the INVO-Trienens [Institute] relationship was looking at what the best business case would be for this technology, with focus on an area where recyclability is feasible,” Dhar explained. Torkelson’s research—which has since been filed for a US patent—has applications across automobile parts, insulation, medical devices, and self-healing materials.
Getting Involved in the Partnership’s Ecosystem of Opportunities
INVO and the Trienens Institute offer extensive training and funding opportunities for students and faculty interested in entrepreneurship in the sustainability space. From business development training to physical incubation space, INVO provides the support necessary to commercialize a good idea.
“We’ve created a mentor network consisting of a host of inventors, consultants, serial entrepreneurs, and attorneys to serve as resources for our community—they give their time, one on time, pro bono, to scale projects within our ecosystem,” said Sonia Kim, Executive Director at INVO’s Querrey InQbation Lab, about the lab’s “Q-Mentor” network. Querrey InQbation also hosts executives in residence, CEO roundtables, and various internship programs to bring inventors and entrepreneurs together across disciplines.
The Trienens Institute offers considerable funding for student and faculty projects in sustainability and energy in addition to travel and professional opportunities. The Institute recently announced more than $600,000 in seed funding to key sustainability projects across academic disciplines to address climate-critical challenges.
To get involved with sustainability innovation projects, garner commercialization support, or learn more about how the INVO/Trienens Institute partnership can help, visit the Office of Innovation and the Trienens Institute websites.