Energy Foundry

Building Industry-Driven Innovation Ecosystems: An Illinois Case Study

By David Baker Executive Director, University Technology Park at IIT, Illinois Institute of Technology Great piece by David Baker from IIT, a core institution within Illinois’ energy ecosystem and founding Smart Grid Cluster partner. Originally posted by the Illinois Innovation Index. Over the past decade, research institutions, universities, and industry in Illinois have joined forces to modernize the…

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff: A Startup Toolkit for Entrepreneurs

     Ask any entrepreneur and they’ll tell you that starting a business is an around-the-clock job that is anything but a breeze. What they’ll also say is that with every new venture comes new learning experiences on how best to maximize time and resources when building a company—even if they’re sprung from missteps. In…

What Is an Entrepreneur-In-Residence?

By Neil Kane, Energy Foundry Entrepreneur-In-Residence Originally posted on Forbes What is an entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR)? I’ve held this title at four different organizations and am taking it on again with Energy Foundry, so it is a question I’m asked frequently. There’s no unambiguous answer because the job has to fit the priorities of the institution,…

Investing in Energy: The time is now, and the place is the Midwest

Also posted on Midwest Energy News In part I of our series we revealed how the Midwest, with its world-renowned Universities and research labs, has all the right intellectual capital to kick-start an energy tech revolution. The next step is pairing these great ideas with the right financial capital, and there are serious investment dollars…

The Energy Tech Revolution: Universities and Research Labs

Last month we kicked off our blog with a pretty big statement—that an energy tech revolution is underway in the Midwest. Now we’ll start to prove it, beginning with a look at the earliest stage of our innovation pipeline: universities and research labs. There’s a lot that needs to happen before a new energy technology…

ComEd Substation Tour

We’d like to give a big thanks to Joe Svachula and the folks at ComEd for giving our team a “behind the scenes” tour of the Taylor Street and Willis Tower substations yesterday morning. Substations are a crucial part of the power grid infrastructure, and we got to see how these stations monitor and control…

The Energy Tech Revolution

Introduction We are going to let you in on a valuable secret: an energy tech revolution is underway in the Midwest. It’s hard not to get sucked into the idea that California is the place for innovation. We go to the conferences, we read TechCrunch, and we’re aware of the fact that over half of the country’s annual venture…
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