2020 Peer PReview: IMPEL Your Innovation! Webinar (Text Version)

Below is the text version of the webinar, "2020 Peer PReview: IMPEL Your Innovation!" See the video.

Audio from video:
Do you have a building technology, hardware, software, publication, program or patent that you want to drive to market impact? Do you want to learn to pitch to a potential funder, co-founder, private-sector collaborator, or gain access to test labs or manufacturing partners? Introducing IMPEL+, incubating market-propelled entrepreneurial mindset at the labs and beyond, a program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and implemented by Berkeley Lab.

We are IMPEL+ innovators. We are IMPEL+ innovators. We are IMPEL+ innovators. We are building researchers, scientists, engineers and architects, policy makers and entrepreneurs. Through the IMPEL+ program, I feel empowered to IMPEL+ my building's idea to impact. I have a concept and I can IMPEL+ it to R and D. I have a patent and I can IMPEL+ it to product. I have a product and I can IMPEL+ it to sales. I have a program and I can IMPEL+ it to scale. Boost your skills and mindset and develop authentic and confident pictures for your building technologies. Expand your public- and private-sector engagement with Silicon Valley experts, innovative building professionals, and building policy leaders. My vision for the IMPEL+ program is that the building's technology stakeholders, the entrepreneurs, the technologists, the national lab staff, are able to take their ideas, take their vision for their technologies, take their startup companies, and truly make an impact in the buildings industry. In one word the IMPEL+ experience to me is empowerment. It's intense, invigorating, collaboration, practice, enlightening, surprisingly helpful, challenging but informative, super helpful, definitely world class, improve and be more confident. Just change my whole perspective on things. It was amazing. It's the beauty of learning, to say it all in one minute. We are IMPEL+ innovators. we are impale innovators. we are IMPEL+ innovators. I hope you will join us.

Karma Sawyer:
Hi, everyone. What a great video. I saw so many familiar faces, and reminding me of the times when we could be in rooms together. It was great. Thank you all very much for sticking with us. My name is Karma Sawyer. I think some of you guys saw me yesterday. I am the program manager for Emerging Technologies here at BTO, and I'm going to be kicking off our next segment, "IMPEL+ Your Innovation." But first, I got myself all dolled up for you folks two days in a row, and so I'm going to take full advantage of that and make some hot-off-of-the-press announcements from EERE. So we just found out this morning that BTO's Solid-State Lighting program will host the first ever virtual solid-state lighting R and D workshop on February 1st through the 4th in 2021. This is an annual event that I've attended myself many times, obviously not virtually. It's phenomenal. It's the place to be when it comes to understanding technology and market innovation for the next generation of lighting. So BTO will be sending out more information on the SSL R and D workshop shortly. Stay tuned.

But now I want to get back to the regularly scheduled program and talk to you about IMPEL+. IMPEL+ stands for "incubating market propelled entrepreneurial mindset at the labs and beyond." it's a unique program funded by BTO and implemented by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. IMPEL+ provides pitch training and incubation for buildings researchers and scientists and professionals and entrepreneurs to IMPEL+ building innovation to impact. BTO, specifically my colleague Mary Hubbard, who you saw in the video, has pioneered this initiative to bridge public and private networks and drive innovation to the market, all in order to strengthen U.S. competitiveness and ensure DOE's investments succeed and address environmental threats. IMPEL+ seeks to drive innovation in design, construction and operation of buildings as well as around issues like demand flexibility and all of the associated issues with integrating renewables, electric vehicles and storage with buildings in order to deliver savings to America's residential and commercial buildings. So as you heard in the earlier segment, hard technologies or physical products can take a while to get to market, and it's really hard and complicated to figure out the right path for them. Through IMPEL+ and BTO's other innovative tech-to-market efforts, we are trying to accelerate that timeline, and we want to work with all of you to figure out how to do it. But today we're going to have some fun, and we're going to hear pitches from five of the innovators working on hard technologies in the building space. So join me in listening to these innovators and provide them with feedback via the online polling. We just had information -- Justin put it in the chat -- on how to access the Mentee survey. It's maybe like two or three comments up. So please log on and take part in the fun. Don't miss the opportunity to directly engage with some of our innovators. So now I'm going to hand it over to Mary Hubbard. As I said, she is BTO's technology to market manager. I really enjoy working with her every day. She's invested a lot in this program, and she's going to tell us all a bit more about the IMPEL+ program and the rest of today's event. Thanks, all, for joining us today; we are excited to have you.

Mary Hubbard:
All right, thank-you, Karma, and thank-you, everyone, for joining us at this year's "IMPEL+ Your Innovation." BTO's IMPEL program first launched in 2019 and brought together five lab innovation teams from various DOE national labs. In 2020 we expanded the program to IMPEL+ and went beyond the national labs to open the program for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and academics. Over the past two years, expert coaches have trained over 70 innovators on critical pitch development skills at workshops held around the country. IMPEL+ innovators have already started to see results through winning prizes awards and fellowships or by kicking off project demonstrations and collaborations with manufacturing partners. We're excited to launch the new virtual 2021 season. This year, high-performing IMPEL+ innovators will be eligible for two tracks: a private funding track with access to new incubator partners Greentown Labs and Austin Technology Incubator, and a public-sector track connecting to IMPEL+ Your Innovation event at next year's BTO peer review. Today, though, as Karma mentioned, we'll hear from five fantastic hard tech incubators. Each pitch will be followed by Q and A from our expert panelists. Our three expert panelists have all been exactly where these innovators are today. They'll follow each pitch by asking questions and giving guidance based on their real-life experience being entrepreneurs themselves. Please join me in welcoming Alexandria Lacfi, New Story's new co-founder and CEO; Erin Keys, Austin Technology Incubator's director of sustainability; and Kipp Bradford, Treau's chief technology officer. And with that, I'll hand it over to Reshma Singh from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, who helps BTO to lead the IMPEL+ program. She'll tell us more about IMPEL+ and what to expect today. Reshma?

Reshma Singh:
Thank-you so much, Mary. Hi, everyone. I'm Reshma Singh from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. I'd like to start by acknowledging Alex Fitzsimmons, David Nemtzow, Karma Sawyer, and Mary Hubbard for the vision and support of the IMPEL program. We developed the IMPEL+ program to uniquely support earlier-stage buildings and energy innovators to address the significant challenges that they face. This seems to be the favorite slide of the day. Sometimes these challenges are called valleys of death. And this is where innovators get stuck very often along the tech-to-market journey. As we all heard, buildings are a fragmented industry. It's the hardest of all hard tech, and the behavior of people has to also be taken into account. So we here at IMPEL+ really have three goals. The first is to provide value proposition coaching, where expert Silicon Valley coaches provide dynamic guidance to innovators using interactive tailored exercises, on-camera training, and live professional critique. The second is to grow the innovator network in order to sustain relationships between building entrepreneurs, industry and manufacturing collaborators, professionals, and the DOE national labs. And the third one is access to incubation. We are launching twin pipelines of access to strategic stakeholders that could help our selected IMPEL+ innovators to spin out or hand off the technologies. This is especially designed to de-risk earlier-stage technologies with public- and private-sector funding.

As a look back, a diverse range of 75 IMPEL innovators from over 12 states across the U.S. brought the hardware and software products, services, solutions, and systems, as well as some programs for commercial and residential buildings, for the buildings-to-grid projects. Many of them were in fact pitching for the first time ever. The innovators gained a skill set to develop road maps and deliver effective value propositions to critical audiences and perhaps even more importantly an entrepreneurial mindset, which helped them to win awards, funds, collaborators, in order to drive the technologies to impact. As a look ahead to 2021, we are planning three virtual workshops. The first workshop in December is already full. More information on applying for the next two workshops in February and March can be found at impel.lbl.gov.

So today's event will feature five innovators from the IMPEL+ 2020 session. Each will pitch for three minutes, followed by a short Q and A with the expert panel. We will then launch two short polls, where we encourage you to participate so we can get your reaction and feedback to each innovator's pitch. Following this, we will have the exciting finale, where we will announce two awards. The first is the Expert Panel Award for the best pitch, and the second is the Audience Choice Award. So please do stick around 'til the very end so that you can help select your favorites. But first let's start with the first poll to warm up. We would love to know who you are, so please go to mentee.com and use the code 10 44 687 and let us know who are you. Are you from the industry? Are you from the government or a national lab? A small business academia? Are you a private funder? Are you an incubator or accelerator? Or other? Now each poll that you will see has a little button at the bottom of it, which says "ask a question or post a comment." So please use that button to provide more information if you'd like on who you are, or for the rest of the polls if there's something else that you'd like to say. Thank-you.

So at this point I'd like to introduce our five fabulous IMPEL+ innovators. It is my distinct pleasure to introduce to you Erik Page, CEO of Blue Iris Labs; Wale Odukomaiya from National Renewable Energy Labs, where he's a research engineer; Elise Strobach, who is the CEO of AeroShield; Steve Norwood, the president of Norwood Architecture; and Luis Fernandes, who is a scientific engineering associate at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, who will be pitching today. So the way we will have the next segment rule is we will start with a short walk on video. We will hear about each of the pictures, each of the innovators, and they will follow it up with the three-minute pitch and the Q and A. So first up, we have Erik Page, CEO of Blue Iris Labs. He will be pitching his technology, Improved Occupant Health Using Circadian Active Lighting Control. Let's roll the video, please.

Audio from video:
Hi. I'm Erik Page, founder and CEO of Blue Iris Labs. I've spent the bulk of my career studying something that most of you probably already intuitively know, that daylight is good. As a lighting scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and later at the California Lighting Technology Center, I developed lighting systems that control light and daylit spaces to save energy, also making the spaces more comfortable. Now at Blue Iris Labs, I'm developing systems that allow us to use daylight and circadian effective electric light to improve our health. I found that when considering something that may on the surface seem obvious, like, daylight is good, there are often still many tricky but ultimately rewarding puzzles to solve.

Erik Page:
Hello. Light impacts our circadian rhythms and in turn our health. It impacts all of us, but I want to talk about the impacts on one particularly vulnerable population, Alzheimer's patients. Alzheimer's damages the part of the brain that regulates circadian rhythms, making it hard to sleep at night. Sadly this often triggers the transition from home care to institutional care as the burden of caring for their loved ones in the middle of the night just becomes too much for family members. When I first learned about this scenario and that light therapy had been shown to help reverse these effects, I felt a calling to utilize the expertise I gained through several decades of developing lighting control systems to work on this problem. Now with significant funding from the NIH, I've launched Blue Iris Labs, where we're pioneering the precise measurement and control of lighting. Our dual mission is to use lighting to improve the circadian health and increase efficiency in buildings. We have a growing dynamic team with a unique mix of lighting science and computer science. Our approach is based on two simple things: gathering better data and basing control algorithms on these better data. We put a spectrometer the size of a grain of sand into an easy-to-install, affordable, battery-powered, cloud-connected device. This allows us to measure the light levels and spectrum at precise locations that matter most, typically near where eyeballs are. This quarter, we're going to mark it with two versions of our sensor, a fixed location and a wearable sensor, designed to measure light levels and spectrum and able to connect to the room's lighting control systems. While the market for circadian light sources has seen explosive growth in recent years, there hasn't been similar action on the sensor side. The products that do exist here are generally very expensive lab-grade spectrometers or much less sophisticated light sensors. Blue Iris Labs is the only one with a low-cost spectral sensor. While we have developed these systems with a 250 billion dollar U.S. Alzheimer's care market in mind, researchers are now using our tools in the broader built environment. It takes about twice as much light as we typically use in offices to trigger our circadian response, creating a bit of a tension between energy efficiency and occupant health. We're working with LBNL and their Flexdot facility and with PNNL in an upcoming office field test in Chicago, as both look for solutions to appropriately balance efficiency and circadian health. We're now looking for customers and go-to-market partners who share our vision that buildings can be optimized for both efficiency and occupant health. Thank-you.

Reshma Singh:
I'd like to request all the expert panelists to please turn on your video so we can ask Erik some questions. Thank-you.

Alexandria Lacfi:
Hi, Erik. I'll get started. My name is Alexandria, and I am a co-founder of New Story. I commend this work. A lot of my work is centered around impact, and I really love when people take technology that can have a broad range of applicability and they focus it on a very kind of high-impact market. So you mentioned the Alzheimer's market. You mentioned you know that's where you want to focus to go to market strategy. I could see, you know -- I think it's important to understand who actually would buy, right? Are you looking at going direct to patient? Are you gonna go through the foundations? Are you going to go to caregivers? Curious if you guys have had any kind of early traction, or what you've learned about how actually to go to market who to market to.

Erik Page:
Sure, yeah. There's really at least three different markets that we're looking at. I think the first market that we're already working with a little bit are researchers. So first Alzheimer's researchers and sleep researchers and folks kind of in that health care research space. Again that Alzheimer's, there's a huge amount of money that is luckily earmarked for Alzheimer's research, so there's literally billions of dollars annually that the NIH is is earmarking for that. So there's a market there of people who are trying to understand the impacts that light have on this population. Broader than that, researchers in the built environment, like I mentioned, LBNL and others who are looking at how light help impacts health in that market. So after the researcher market, I think we are looking at more of the Alzheimer's care facilities, developing systems that are -- they are more system approaches that are geared to installing a lighting system that kind of automatically does the right thing for circadian health. And then kind of lastly, the third market is taking what we learned in those very kind of detailed Alzheimer's care facilities and applying some of that same knowledge to office lighting, in places where we all are.

Alexandria Lacfi:
Yeah, the research funding I'd say is very encouraging. And then really important that it seems like the technology that you're working on is at a point where you're exiting the research phase, right? It's like working. So thinking about those last two categories and putting a lot of focus there so that you can capitalize on the market is an exciting opportunity for you guys, I agree. Congratulations.

Erin Keys:
Hi. My name is Erin Keys, and I've worked for a variety of different sectors inside of the energy industry for the past decade or so, most recently in distributed energy management. And my question is more centered around the sensitivity of your sensors, if one of them goes down or they're not working and who would actually go and service those sensors. So you know, it looked like in your picture there were quite a few around the room. So if one or two goes down, does that really impact the efficacy of your solution? And if so, can the maintenance staff at the hotel do it? Or what's your plan to support the system over the long haul?

Erik Page:
Yeah, sure, no, that's a that's a great question and certainly one we're still kind of mapping out. At the first level and especially with this kind of research community that we're targeting, so there are cloud-connected devices and we're using kind of existing platforms and technologies that are built to do things like we're trying to do at scale. So Google Cloud and things like that. So hopefully we'll have a -- the go-downs will be minimal. We're building in a lot of things that I know myself as a researcher would want to have had. So like Flash storage memory on the devices, so even if the network goes down you're not losing the data. It's kind of the cost of going in and doing a clinical trial is extraordinary, from the people -- the cost of adding Flash to a device is minimal. So we're building items like that. I think ultimately when we go to the, you know, with an at that research market they typically have the skills, the technical skills, I think, needed to do a lot of the work that's going to be needed with us to service the systems. You know, we can do things remotely or give them hand-hold them through that. When we go to that Alzheimer's care facilities and similar, it's going to be a very different story, right? We're going to have to have a very robust solution that doesn't go down, and if it does, we're not going to be able to count on them to deal with it. So we're gonna -- it's something that we're gonna have to provide ourselves or partner with folks who will be able to help us with that.

Kipp Bradford:
I'm interested in, Erik, in understanding more about your product costs, and also is the sensor element something that's proprietary to you that you've developed? And I'll have a follow-up question to that.

Erik Page:
Sure, yeah, take the second one first. Parts of it are. We have a couple of patents. We've got two issued patents, or maybe three issue patents, and a couple pending. So yeah, I heard your talk earlier. We're building a patent perform portfolio, and recognizing that there's ways around our patents and anyone's. So we're -- I agree with everything you say. Their patents are important and not the end-all-be-all. And yeah, so the costs, I mean, without getting too deep into the spilling our competitive advantages, I think that the sensors themselves, we're planning on going to market with less than two hundred dollars per sensor, maybe closer to one hundred dollars. Typical light sensors, they're used for just measuring flip topic light or are cheaper than that, maybe in the, you know, twenty to fifty dollar range. But spectrometers that are doing kind of the types of measures that we're doing start at two thousand dollars. So the data that we're providing is much, much richer than is typically done and much, much less expensive than what it typically takes to do this.

Kipp Bradford:
I think that addresses some of the follow-on question, which is what does your competition look like? Who else is out there, and what are they providing? So you know, unique differentiation.

Erik Page:
Yeah, I think that, yeah, basically is the two ends of the spectrum, no pun intended, or the light sensors and the spectrometers, yeah.

Kipp Bradford:
I have another question about the shark hat, but it's rhetorical.

Erik Page:
Yeah, OK, good. Yeah, it was very intimidating.

Reshma Singh:
Thank-you very much, panel of judges. Those were great questions. We do have to move on to the next innovator, so thank-you for turning your videos on. We're going to move to the poll now, and I would encourage everybody to please go to menti.com and please provide your feedback. The first poll is, was the pitch clear, compelling, and succinct? You'll see a sliding bar so please add your answer to it. And again, you'll see a button right at the bottom, which allows you to provide any feedback or ask a question. So please use that. That's the first poll for Erik.

And the next poll is, what should be the next step for this innovator? So in your opinion, should Erik test his product, his light sensor? Pilot it? Manufacture it? Go for the research funding that he was talking about? Get private funding? Go to an industry partner right away? Or find a team member? Or if you have any other suggestions, please use the button for providing him customized feedback. Remember, Erik has just launched his startup and would love to get your feedback, so please provide your feedback so that we can get it to him and we can help him. And for the folks who've asked how we can get in touch with Erik, we'll probably send an email out once the recordings go out where we can provide the links to the websites of all of the five innovators.

Thank-you very much for your answers. So at this point, I'd like to ask the judges to turn off your videos because we're going to move to our next innovator, which is Wale Odukomaiya from NREL. And he's going to pitch his New Phase Change Material for 3D Printing of Thermal Energy Storage. Let's roll the video.

Audio from video:
Hi. My name is Wale Odukomaiya. I'm a research engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, working in buildings and thermal sciences. I joined NREL about two and a half years ago after completing my Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech and completing a short postdoc appointment at another DOE national lab. I'm passionate about transforming energy through building science. When I'm not working to transform energy through building science, I enjoy traveling, staying active, and spending time with family and friends. I heard about the IMPEL+ program through an email that was circulated at NREL and decided to participate because I've always had an interest in technology commercialization. The program taught me about how to translate technology attributes into a tangible value proposition for customers and other stakeholders, and clearly articulating that value proposition. I'm looking forward to telling you about some of the technology that I've been working on at NREL.

Wale Odukomaiyo:
All right, hello, everyone. So as previously mentioned, my name is Wale Odukomaiya. I'm a research engineer at NREL, and today I'll be telling you about 3D tests. So with rising cost of energy wouldn't it be great if we had several technologies that save building operators money on energy bills and enable deeper adoption of renewable energy? Thermal energy storage is one such technology that can play a significant role, due to its lower cost and ease of integration with building heating and cooling compared with traditional battery storage, enabling distributed deployment at scale. Successfully implementing thermal energy storage materials in buildings requires composite heat exchangers to integrate the thermal storage into heating and cooling loops, or building envelopes. This will require next-generation complex heat exchanger shapes and geometries that can be designed and tested rapidly to maximize efficiency. This is difficult to achieve with traditional manufacturing approaches. So 3D printing is an emerging technology that can realize these intricate shapes and geometries. So here at NREL together with partners we are developing phase change materials for thermal energy storage in the form of filaments that are 3D printable on currently available low-cost commercial 3D printers, so that thermal engineers, product developers, researchers, and academics can rapidly prototype complex heat exchanger shapes and geometries faster and locally to commercialize their innovations and create better performing final thermal energy storage geometries. So in the middle figure of my slide here, I show an example of what one of these more intricate phase change material heat exchanger designs might look like. Having a commercially available phase change material printing filament enables realizing this type of design. Other benefits include reduced design life cycle and manufacturing time, reduce capital costs through less material waste, and reduced operating costs due to more efficient final thermal energy storage devices. So here in my hand is an example of what a scaled-down cross-section of such a device might look like.

This was 3D printed using filament that we developed that is 50 phase change material by weight. And on a commercial 3D printer without requiring any hardware changes to the printer. We are now seeking R and D funding and partnerships with relevant federal R and D and private industry stakeholders to continue to develop this technology. The funding would be used to further enhance the material properties and printability of our phase change material filaments, scale up manufacturing, and transition to market through our industrial partner. When successful, this will be the first commercially available material enabling 3D printing of phase change material thermal energy storage components. Thank-you.

Reshma Singh:
Thank-you, Wale. We're right almost right on time, so judges please come back on the video.

Erin Keys:
Thanks for your presentation, Wale. I just had a quick question. You mentioned to commercialize your technology, who would you actually be selling this to? You talked about the technology, but like what is the actual solution in terms of your product? And then who would your end customer be?

Wale Odukomaiyo:
Yeah, so the product -- there's kind of a couple iterations of this that we've been working on. In this specific case, the product would be a filament, a 3D printing filament that we would sell to, again, thermal engineers, product developers, researchers, academics, to essentially make parts, manufacture parts that have phase change material, thermal energy storage embedded in those parts. And so the potential applications range from heat exchangers for heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems in buildings or building envelopes, to thermal management of batteries or microelectronics, cold storage for pharmaceuticals or other cold chain applications, etc.

Erin Keys:
OK, I'll let the other judges go. Thanks.

Alexandria Lacfi:
One question just out of curiosity. I'm sorry if I missed it. What is the extrusion material?

Wale Odukomaiyo:
Sure. So there's a few different base polymers that we're working on. That includes TPU, which is a thermoplastic polyurethane; nylon, as well as polypropylene. And so that's the base material, and then we have these phase change materials, which again, there's different types of phase change materials, different chemistries that work, are activated at different temperatures that are part of the matrix, as well.

Alexandria Lacfi:
I guess I'm curious. So part of my work, we've done 3D printing of buildings, and often in small and large 3D printing initiatives, supply chain of the necessary like admixtures or components that you need can be a barrier. So I'm just curious about how ubiquitous or -- yeah, how ubiquitous, how easy to find it are the materials that you're using in order to print.

Wale Odukomaiyo:
Yeah, so that's a great question. So the base polymers are standard commercially available polymers that are widely available. The nice thing about extrusion-based 3D printing is the base polymer can actually be a recycled polymer, as well, enabling kind of circularity in that process. The phase change materials themselves, it kind of depends on the specific chemistry of the face change material, but in general, they're very widely available, as well.

Alexandria Lacfi:
OK, fantastic. Maybe I'll have another one, but I'll let Kipp go first.

Kipp Bradford:
I kind of have a follow-on to Erin's question. I am a fan of phase change materials in some applications. The materials themselves are like you said not necessarily new, but I think the question that I have is, what's the barrier to adoption of phase change materials in these applications today? And what data do you have that can show that you can overcome those barriers to adoption? Like again, getting back to that market value question, is there enough value out there in what you're doing to make a compelling case for the business model?

Wale Odukomaiyo:
Yeah, so that's a great question, and I think the answer to that question varies from specific end use from application to application, essentially. I would say in the building space one major barrier to implementation is cost at scale, and then obviously the phase change materials themselves have materials challenges associated with them, and manufacturing final geometries. So we think in this filament we've overcome some of those material properties challenges. As far as the cost, we haven't done anything special per se to address the cost challenge, but we feel that having a 3D printing filament that's widely accessible and that can be bought kind of doesn't have to be bought at massive scales, for example can be bought in spools and used on low cost currently existing commercially available 3D printers, kind of helps to democratize access to these materials and get it in the hands of innovators and engineers and lay people.

Erin Keys:
Wale, you mentioned that you're seeking funding. So how much funding are you seeking, and what do you expect that you'll be able to work with that next round?

Wale Odukomaiyo:
Sure, so I think at this stage, so this is -- so far we've kind of received some early-stage funding to kind of prove the concept and show that we can make these these kind of filaments. As I mentioned in my pitch, the next step would be to kind of improve material properties, improve printability on existing commercial printers, and also scale up manufacturing. So I think that would probably take a series of you know R and D projects to do. I would say anything on the order of a million dollars to a couple million dollars would allow us to make a significant dent in terms of solving some of these challenges and getting closer to a high enough technology readiness level to where we can transition to our partner to commercialize.

Erin Keys:
Awesome. One of the things as I'm sitting in the funder's seat that's always often very helpful, and it can be a range, is saying at a million dollars this is what we spend the funds on, and this is what we can achieve. If you want to help us achieve more, at the five million dollar price point, right, here's the team I would hire, here are the milestones that we'll hit, here's what we can achieve in this amount of time. So you can give kind of buckets of the amounts and what you would build, and your timeline for those different buckets of funding.

Wale Odukomaiyo:
Yep, got it; thanks for the recommendation.

Reshma Singh:
So Wale, I have one question I'd like to take from the audience. Is there a targeted application or a solution looking for the problem? So I think this is back to the value proposition, right? So I think if you can answer that question, because that is your value proposition being very specific.

Wale Odukomaiyo:
Sure. So I'll give two examples of that. So one application of phase change materials is to embed them into heat exchangers to serve as an evaporator in air conditioning systems, and that essentially allows you to disconnect in time when you run your compressor and draw electricity from the grid from when you actually provide cooling to the building or to the air-conditioned space. And one of the major challenges with -- current challenges with that application -- is that you're not able to achieve kind of these more intricate designs and geometries that perform better from a heat transfer perspective. And you also can't directly integrate the heat source or heat synch fluid channel into the phase change material. And so being able to 3D print would overcome those challenges and enable higher efficiency, faster manufacturing and just better performing air-conditioning integrated thermal energy storage systems. Another example that I'll give that's not related to buildings is in thermal management of microelectronics. It's a similar sort of heat transfer problem, where you need kind of these high surface area parts that have kind of a lot of extended surfaces and are able to integrate or mate closely with the electronic component, whether it's a chip or a battery, that's dissipating heat. And being able to print the phase change material, again, would allow you to achieve these more intricate geometries and really design the heat synch, the phase change material integrated heat synch, without any constraints that traditional manufacturing approaches have.

Reshma Singh:
Great; thank-you so much. Thank-you, judges. We'll move on to the polls now. So a good time to turn your videos off if you'd like. So let's move the first poll, please. And Wale, while people are providing the poll results, you have a lot of questions on the Q and A as well as on chat, so if you don't mind taking some of those questions and responding to them on chat itself. We won't have time to do it verbally but on chat, please. So let's go to the poll. And the first one is, was the pitch clear, compelling, and succinct? Sliding bar there, and please provide any feedback to the feedback button. And then if you advance to the next poll on Menti, you should be able to see the next poll, which is, what should be the next step for Wale? Test? Pilot? Manufacture? Get grant funding? Get private funding? Find an industry partner, or a team member? Please use the button for any comments or questions. We'll give it a few more seconds.

Wonderful. So let's move on to our third innovator for the day. I'd like to introduce Elise Strobach, who is the CEO of AeroShield. She will be pitching on her Clear, Super-Insulating Aerogel material for windows. Let's roll the video, please.

Audio from video:
Hi. My name is Elise Strobach and I'm the CEO and co-founder of AeroShield Materials. I'm very excited to join you today from my home state of Wisconsin, where my passion for energy efficiency and renewable energies was born. This path led me to found AeroShield based on my Ph.D. work at MIT, and I've been grateful for the opportunity to live in a home and a climate that represents the kind of windows that our material, our super-insulating, ultra-clear, silica aerogel, can really have a huge performance increase. I'm also excited next year to move back to Massachusetts to join the core AeroShield team that's putting together a pilot manufacturing facility to demonstrate the manufacturability of our material. IMPEL+ has been a key part of our journey to getting to this phase. It's helped us learn to better communicate with all of the stakeholders in our ecosystem, everybody from homeowners to architects to manufacturers and beyond. And that's particularly exciting because we've also had the opportunity to connect with other innovators in this ecosystem. And that's allowed us to make our work even more impactful and enjoyable.

Elise Strobach:
Fantastic. So you'll probably spend 80 percent of the rest of your life inside of a building, which is why it's so important that we have windows to keep us comfortable and productive. But they come with a price.

Host voice:
Hey, Elise, we can barely hear you. I don't know if it's maybe your headphones.

Elise Strobach:
Maybe, that could be. You know what, let me just try unplugging and see if that works. ... Is that better?

Host voice:
Yeah, we can hear you better now. I'll start the video. Here you go.

Elise Strobach:
Great; thank-you. So as I was saying, we'll spend 80 percent of our lives inside of a building, which is why windows are essential to keeping us happy and productive. But they come with a big energy price: 40 billion dollars in heating and cooling energy is lost through our windows every year in the United States. And to solve this problem with the urgency that we need to, we have to have a cost-effective path to better thermal performance. AeroShield has been designed to fill that need. My name is Elise Strobach, and I'm the CEO, co-founder and inventor of AeroShield. And we manufacture a super-insulating sheet of porous glass that's designed to upgrade over traditional gas fill solutions. Our material is based on patent-pending, silica aerogel technology that was developed during my Ph.D. at MIT and that allows it to be more transparent than glass, more insulating than air, and lighter than a marshmallow. AeroShield is a thin solid sheet that's designed to drop into the existing insulated glass unit manufacturing process to enable first products that can achieve an R-6 performance with all of the advantages of a double clean form factor. With AeroShield sealed inside, our windows can be thinner, lighter, and more cost-effective than even state-of-the-art triple-pane products, and that can save homeowners thousands of dollars. This vision of efficient energy windows that are affordable for everybody is what drove Dr. Kyle Wilkie and myself to spin this company out of the lab and into manufacturing. And we've been able to raise over a million dollars in grants and investment and are working with three national labs to support our scale-up. But this is where we need your help to make our material as effective as possible. First, we're looking to hire and grow our manufacturing team to prepare for pilot production starting next year with industries standardized test units. So please connect us with anybody that you might recommend we connect with or seek as candidates. Following that progress next year, we'll also be raising one to two million dollars C round and seeking industry partners to share input and expertise on our process development as we scale up sizes and volumes. We'll also be looking for manufacturing partners to co-develop cost-effective integration with our customers, the insulated glass manufacturers. Your help in connecting us with the right people and partners really brings AeroShield so much closer to being able to cut energy losses for 30 million new windows in half and to save more than half a gigaton of carbon every year. We're on a really exciting path to fundamentally better windows, and I'm just excited that AeroShield really is becoming the clear choice for insulation.

Reshma Singh:
Thank-you, Elise. Let's move to expert panel, please.

Kipp Bradford:
Great; I'll go ahead and get started with the first question. Yeah, the shark hats are awesome but they get a little hot, which normally wouldn't be a problem because I'm in New England right now. It's a little cold, but I'm in a basement that keeps a lot of heat.

Reshma Singh:
The shark has intended to increase the heat.

Kipp Bradford:
Yeah, but not on not on the expert panel. Aerogel. So I actually happen to be about three miles away from Aspen Aerogels Factory in East Providence, Rhode Island, and pretty familiar with technology. It's great technology. Could be certainly a breakthrough if you can put an aerogel panel in the middle of a double-pane window. Certainly has been something that's been hard to do. So I kind of have two questions. One really is about the scale-up. Like, if you're really at a place where you've got a breakthrough technology that can change the face of windows, why are you limiting yourself to a small fundraise? It seems like that's a big market and you could really go for a big -- much, much, much larger number. And that kind of gets to the second question, which is your barrier to adoption. So I'm sure there's lots of technical challenges to overcome, but how do you get over the resistance to new products and having to demonstrate that -- I'm sure you've seen double-pane windows or triple-pane windows where they get sputtering on the inside or over five years they degrade. What can you do to demonstrate long-term viability of the product for something that's going to be in a building for a couple decades? So to break those two questions: One is why are you only asking for a million dollars or a small amount of money? The second is how do you get over that barrier to adoption with your long-term liability demonstration?

Elise Strobach:
Yeah, both hitting really at the core of hard questions. But I really appreciate that, and also you bringing up Aspen Aerogels, because I think that I definitely want to start by answering that we are not unaware that aerogels have been considered for this application for a really long time. And I think there are kind of two ways that we've kind of tackled it. And so those answers to both parts kind of mixed together, which one is that we've been very careful about how we put together our development plan to really get at the core questions that you're asking about. One is, certainly there's material durability. But until we have a manufacturing process that really is truly scalable and can hit the cost sensitivity that this market needs, I think that those questions about longevity and how exactly it's incorporated are almost a little bit moot. So that is what we've pre-loaded in our development, is how can we answer the most critical questions, the riskiest ones, really, really effectively. So the good news is we're not the first. There is equipment out there, and that's actually the pre-seed raise that we just closed, has been enough for us to find refurbished equipment and start to build out this pilot manufacturing capacity for less than half a million dollars, which is pretty fantastic because it allows us to then de-risk in a very thoughtful way. And then at the same time we have these fantastic relationships with national labs, who are just experts at the kind of testing that we need to do early on to allow us to kind of, as much as possible, get the information we need, not only to develop our process so that these questions about durability are the things that we can learn now, that allow us to de-risk that even before we have a full manufacturing process. And so I think we've been really thoughtful about that, as well. But to your main question, which is there is this market risk out there. And some of the choices that we've made about what our material is made of. Ours is right now a pure silica formulation, because we don't want to have to deal with degradation of hydrophobicity, or you know different constituents in that material. We want something that is pure plain glass and can leverage the existing technologies and manufacturing process so that we're not creating inherently new risks. But of course demonstration is is certainly needed to address those questions outright.

Alexandria Lacfi:
Elise, awesome work. Excited to see what you guys build, and good luck. I'm really curious. If you were here in the earlier sessions, a lot of the speakers were talking -- including myself -- were talking about the importance of understanding and talking to as many stakeholders as possible. You mentioned that the glass manufacturers, that's your target customer. So I'm curious, how many have you spoken with? What's your cadence at which you're speaking to them, or that you plan to speak to them? And then typically they will tell you what they need to see in order for them to get to the point of signing an LOI or partnering with you. So what are they telling you that they need to see in order to move forward?

Elise Strobach:
Yeah, definitely. So I think the two big questions that are -- we've definitely sourced from voice of customer. And I'll say that we've done a lot of customer discovery in this area. But I'll say that it's a pretty big ecosystem, and I came in with a mechanical engineering research background, not from the field. So it did definitely take us a while to stage. So I want to be like very transparent about what we know and what we don't. And I think we understand in bins the technical requirements very well for different stakeholder chains, different end user, different delivery methods. In particular, we've really focused in on residential and residential insulated glass manufacturers. And I would say that we understand, I think, the process and how it exists and what the key triggers are that are either challenging to innovate or drive cost or are determining the really important aspects like aesthetic and quality and durability. But out of that, what we've heard is we've got the really the first clear aerogel in my opinion, and from what we've seen in literature. And so there's already inherently a lot of understanding about the value there. And so the big questions remaining, I think, are manufacturability, and it's about cost and it's about size. So right now we're really focused on being able to get to industry standard test panels. But there's through accelerated lifetime testing and all those really important industry standard ratings. But at the same time, we also want to do that with the right process that has the right sensitivity to indicate that we can drive down this cost to be something that has that really nice payback period and can change those barriers of adoption.

Alexandria Lacfi:
Yeah, just a recommendation is talking to customers, of course, early and often is great. And then sometimes before -- what I've seen is before they might be ready to be a customer, they might actually be interested in being an investor. So if you show them interesting metrics or interesting that you're hitting milestones and they see that this could be potentially very influential to their business, they might want to see some more before they agree to buy from you, but many, even if they don't advertise it, customers might invest in the company. And then you have a more regular cadence of being able to hear their perspective and their feedback.

Elise Strobach:
Yeah, definitely, I really appreciate that.

Reshma Singh:
We're out of our time. Kipp, did you have a very, very quick question?

Kipp Bradford:
Erin does.

Erin Keys:
Yeah, yeah, I know, I just had a quick question. Because we actually work at ATI with a company that does retrofits for this. So my question is twofold. One is, are you more so, as Alexandria said, that your customer would be the manufacturer? But is this for new build or is this for retrofit? And if it's for retrofit, have you considered all the additional downtime, and you have to move people out of the office? And like that was a really key indicator for the company that we work with, that having an incredibly adaptable retrofittable solution attacked a larger part of the market in a lot of ways. So have you looked at that market segmentation in terms of like new build versus retrofit, A? And then B, I might have misunderstood you -- are you saying that it goes between a double pane, and if yes, then you would have to go to market with a double-pane vendor? In which case, understanding what your impact is on their potential sales / value proposition and all that stuff, and how you work together, adds probably a layer of complexity. So it really centers on like the retrofit market versus the new build market, and how you partner with the right people to go after either of those segments.

Elise Strobach:
Yeah, and I'll respond really quickly. With one, retrofit market is something I looked at, very near and dear. It's a energy loss, this huge bin that's just really challenging to eat away at. So definitely of interest to us. We felt that bringing that kind of it would be fundamentally a new product in delivery. And we felt that market risk was too much to take that bite off while we're also working on the manufacturing and the technical risks. So I think our intention is now is, if there's an opportunity that we don't realize is right now we would certainly look at that very closely. But otherwise, as soon as we can come back to that pool. And then, yeah, right now we're focused on using the existing manufacturers to access the end users. And from our customer discovery in the residential chain, those distribution channels and those relationships with people who actually are the decision makers in sourcing and installing windows, that was going to be a big barrier if we seek to be more consumer-facing. And so for a lot of reasons, we want to drive impact and get there quick, we felt that existing manufacturers were the kind of best path at this point.

Reshma Singh:
Thank-you very much, expert panel, and we'll move to. Elise, that was great. Our first poll to move things along is, was Elise's pitch clear, compelling, and succinct? So that should be a quick answer. And then moving on to the second poll, is, what should be the next step for Elise?

And Elise, you also have a bunch of questions. If you don't mind answering them offline, that would be great. Thank-you so much. So we'll move on to our fourth innovator now, Steve Norwood, who is the president of Norwood Architecture. And he is going to be pitching his invention, which he calls Dryside Cladding. Let's take it away.

Audio from video:
Hi. I'm Steve Norwood. I'm a forensic architect. I live in Lewisville, Colorado, and I got introduced to the IMPEL+ program through LinkedIn. And I had some contacts on LinkedIn that mentioned the program. I thought it'd be a great opportunity to introduce some of my ideas to the broader audience. I'm also an inventor and have some ideas that came out of my forensic architecture practice. I have two sons that are attending college. In my free time I spend time outdoors, and also I practice a martial art called aikido. I'm looking forward to seeing you on the web soon. Thank-you very much.

Steve Norwood:
Hi. As you know, I'm Steve Norwood, and one of the things we've been asked to look at over the years is problems with the exterior building wall where water has gotten in the wall. And this has caused damage in the building, mold, rot, and it's because the walls have trouble drying out is one of the main problems. We see this problem over and over again, particularly in residential properties that are wood frame construction. So to address this very expensive problem, cost homeowners millions of dollars in repairs, insurance companies, developers, these kinds of things, is something we call dry side cladding. And this allows the building wall to dry from both sides of the cladding or siding. It's done through this omnidirectional pattern. This is unique. We have utility patents both in the U.S. and in foreign countries to allow this kind of drainage, ventilation, and diffusion of water vapor throughout the wall. Where this is really becoming an issue now in the U.S. and in other countries is that the building code is changing, both in the U.S. and now throughout residential properties in Canada. They require capillary brakes and drainage systems in residential properties. The standard solution to this is to provide commercial-grade solutions, which are drainage mats or furring strips or clips. These are expensive. If you take a standard kind of fiber cement siding application, that might run 10 dollars a square foot. If you add furring, these kind of commercial systems, it's about 30 percent increase in price. So really, the value proposition here is that we have a solution to a problem that's going to become a regulatory requirement that can be done with a standard installation, simple application, that doesn't require this 30 percent increase in price. So really, what we're looking for is a manufacturer who can join with us. And this gives manufacturers another opportunity, which is because siding systems are moisture sensitive, we can use new materials, recycled materials, agricultural waste product materials that have been tried in the past but because they're moisture sensitive and can't dry as easily, this technology opens doors to new ideas in siding and cladding, new manufacturing, new jobs in the U.S. through manufacturing, protected through patent technologies, that I think is a real opportunity for U.S. manufacturers. So we're looking for someone to join with us in a royalty agreement. We're looking for help in locating and connecting with manufacturers, as well as pilot programs to demonstrate this technology in new material systems. Thank-you very much.

Reshma Singh:
Thank-you, Steve.

Alexandria Lacfi:
Hello, Steve. Alexandria here. Great. So you're at the point where you want to get to manufacturing. I'm curious, what has your research told you about the menu, the number of the type of the manufacturing facilities that could accommodate manufacturing, this type of size and scale of what you're building?

Steve Norwood:
Well, of course it's very material-dependent. And so the manufacturing systems are really driven by different kind of material technologies. But in general, as people have mentioned previously, the building technology world, particularly siding, is a commodity. So it's very price-sensitive. And it's what you'll actually hear people call fast follow, meaning people are waiting for someone to try a technology and then we'll try to duplicate it. So there is a hesitancy, I think, to be the first adopter to a technology. Currently, well, maybe a year ago, people were making as much siding as they could possibly make. Their factories were completely maxed out. So there was no reason to try some new technology, right? But that's changing now. And so with this regulatory modification and changes that are coming, looking forward, I think there's an opportunity there.

Alexandria Lacfi:
What's causing it to change? I think maybe the -- and I probably didn't ask it as well -- but maybe the heart of my question is the availability of the manufacturer, the type of manufacturing facilities that you need, and sufficient capacity in order to kind of get to that next phase where you are, where you do have a manufacturing partner.

Steve Norwood:
Well, there's been a lot of consolidation in the manufacturing of siding or cladding systems, if I understand your question correctly, and there's probably only four or five major manufacturers in the U.S. James Hardy, several different LP, some of these other manufacturers, are some of the biggest manufacturers.

Alexandria Lacfi:
And have you had a chance to -- so are those your target manufacturers?

Steve Norwood:
Some of those, and some of maybe, some of the smaller. There are some that are maybe more open to new technologies.

Alexandria Lacfi:
Have you spoken to any of them yet?

Steve Norwood:
I have, yes.

Alexandria Lacfi:
OK, and what are they telling you about what they need to see in order to make a partnership possible?

Steve Norwood:
Well, I think that what we're seeing is opportunity that's opening now. I think up until now, I think it's been "talk to us in a year when the market shifts." So I think there's some change that we're starting to see some opening now.

Alexandria Lacfi:
OK, good luck.

Kipp Bradford:
I'll jump in with the question next. I think I hit unmute before Erik did. Do any of the companies in this industry, any of the manufacturers that you're looking at partnering with, have a history of licensing intellectual property from outside inventors?

Steve Norwood:
Well, I think there is a challenge there. There's -- I don't think so. I think this is a little bit of a pushing the rock up the hill a little bit, when it comes to that. It's an unusual pitch to them, and they're a little bit surprised when you knock on their door.

Kipp Bradford:
I might pose my next question more as a comment, which is that you need to figure out a way to get leverage, because those companies, when you approach them, they're going to look at your intellectual property and they're going to say, we're the experts in this field. We manufacture, we've got design teams, engineering teams, we have access to all the information, and we have lots of capital. So if this really is something that is a compelling opportunity, they're gonna go around you and develop it in-house. So as you're shopping things around, the thing you need to ask yourself is what leverage do I have that would compel them to work with me and not just look at my patents and say, interesting idea, we can do it like this, and we don't infringe on your patents?

Steve Norwood:
Yeah, it's an interesting comment and without saying too much, it's a dynamic somewhat -- what's the right phrase -- but this is already happening. What you're describing is already happening. And it's a dynamic ongoing process, so I think you're right on point.

Erin Keys:
First a clarifying question. I heard you say where it's not 30x more expensive. Is this on price parity with existing solutions?

Steve Norwood:
It's going to have some cost increase, of course, to apply this pattern, and it will depend on the material used, because in general most of the manufacturing systems are designed to make things flat. So the technologies have been designed to make things square and flat. And so, and if things are extruded it's difficult to make a pattern, when something is extruded. Certain city materials are extruded; some are stamped. Some are made basically out of a paper process, like fiber cement is essentially a paper making or cardboard type process. So there's a tooling cost and there's some additional material cost, but the feedback I've received so far is they don't approach anywhere near the cost of other competing technologies. So there's a margin there. And so that's where I think this value added is, is in that margin difference.

Erin Keys:
And then my other question -- well, it's more of a comment. That is following on what Kipp said about getting leverage. I would really think long and hard about who's experiencing the pain here. like you mentioned water damage and a few other things. there's a lot of smart water meters that have actually teamed up with insurance companies, where the leverage is, you know, we will reduce the expenditure that you guys have to pay out whenever there is water damage, because we prevent it on the front end. and so I'm just spitballing here, but that could be an interesting angle that you're basically incentivizing people to install this through the insurance company, because for me, there's a little bit of a delineation between like, yeah, you've got water damage. that's that the end customer is not necessarily the person experiencing that wired image because they're not paying out, if that makes sense.

Steve Norwood:
Makes a lot of sense. I think that's generally a problem where -- so I'm a building nerd, right? And so I've always -- architects want to solve all the problems of the world through buildings, and think that technology can solve these problems. But your solution may solve someone's problem, and they're too disconnected from this chain of commerce that gets to them, right? So it's an excellent point, and how you make those connect. So I think there has to be a value that's more immediate, which I think is this regulatory connection, which is kind of a backwards way of the damage coming back to finally, rules changing to try to prevent this kind of problem.

Reshma Singh:
So talking about leverage, I think the fact that you've gone through a public-sector program such as IMPEL+, hopefully connections to national labs and validation through testing, etc., might be able to help you. But I did want to say thank-you to the panelists again, and we will probably need to move on to the polls. So Steve, the first question that people are going to poll you on is, was the pitch clear, compelling, and succinct? So please everybody go to menti.com and provide Steve your feedback. Again, you know, he's an architect this field of buildings. Architects are usually not very active; mostly we see engineers and technologists. So it's great to see an architect here. So please provide them any feedback that you can. And then the second poll is, what should be Steve's next step? Test it? Pilot it? Manufacture it? Maybe find an industry partner, as you mentioned, Steve? So again, please use the button for providing any customized feedback to Steve as he ventures along his tech-to-market journey. And Steve, there's a bunch of questions for you on Q and A -- I'm sorry, on the direct chat, if you don't mind taking them offline. Thank-you so much, Steve. That was great. OK, so we'll move to our last presenter for the day. Last but not least, Luis Fernandes from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, who's going to be pitching his invention, Deep Daylight-Redirection Blinds.

Audio from video:
Hi. I'm Luis Fernandes, and I'm a researcher at Berkeley Lab. I've been interested in energy since I was a nerdy kid who wanted to be a nuclear engineer when he grew up. Later on in college, I became fascinated with the idea of using the energy from the sun to meet our energy needs in buildings, and I've been doing research related to windows and lighting since then. The IMPEL+ program has helped me develop how I can communicate research ideas in a way that's compelling and oriented towards bringing technologies to market. Today I'm very excited about sharing one of those ideas with you.

Luis Fernandes:
Hi, everyone. Can you all see and hear me? ... How many of you have worked in a cubicle so far away from a window that you didn't get any daylight? How about a space by a window where blinds were always down because of too much glare from the sun? Daylight helps us reduce lighting energy use and regulate our circadian rhythms, but in our workspaces too often we don't have enough daylight or we have too much of it going in the wrong direction. At Berkeley Lab, we have developed a blind that can be installed in the top two feet of windows in commercial buildings. And this blind can redirect sunlight 40 feet or more into a building. We invented a mechanism that can change the width of the blind slats as well as the slat's angle. When the sun is high, the slats are narrow. This avoids light losses because the slats don't shade each other. When the sun is low, the slots are wide, and this avoids light leaks towards the occupant's eyes that cause glare and productivity loss. Using DOE's radiance software, we estimate lighting energy savings in a space can reach 50 percent or more. The reduced reliance on electric lighting will also increase the resilience of your building. This blind is suitable for areas with sunny climates, and this could bring daylight to an additional 800 million square feet of existing open plan office space in the United States. Unlike skylights, the system does not require costly openings on the roof, and look, because it's dynamic, its performance is more consistent over time than static systems like prismatic window films. This concept is an extension of a traditional venetian blind and does not require a complete retooling of manufacturing processes. The prototype you see here is a benchtop proof of concept that we developed with funding from the California Energy Commission. If you are a manufacturer potentially interested in licensing this technology I would love to talk to you. If you have capabilities that can apply to window automation, actuation, controls, materials, or architectural integration, this is an opportunity for you to expand into advanced window technologies and I want to work with you on developing this system from the benchtop into a full-scale system we can install and demonstrate in real buildings. Thank-you.

Erin Keys:
Thanks, Luis. Oh, sorry -- can I just launch in? Cool, OK. Thanks, Luis. Super-interesting. I have two questions. One is, you alluded to the fact that your technology did not decrease productivity or was distracting in the workplace. My question is, how did you gather that sort of data? Did you have this in some sort of facility and you were gathering qualitative surveys from the people inside? Because that was actually one of the immediate things that I thought of, is like how annoying it might be to have these like flashes of light, especially when you're trying to do a presentation or something like that. So that was question number one, just kind of clarification on how you were able to make that sort of statement. And then two, this thing looks like it's got a ton of moving parts. So how does it actually operate, and how have you tested its resilience in terms of how long it can last before some of those maybe mechanical parts start needing some maintenance?

Luis Fernandes:
OK, those are excellent questions. I just want to start by saying that this concept sounds very simple but it has been around for decades and actually implementing it is very difficult. So what we have done is actually prove that we can implement something that does this and build it. So we haven't gotten to a stage where we have a full-scale system that we can test, even in a lab with people in there, and say, oh, this is annoying, or it isn't. So that's where we are in terms of the development of the technology. In terms of whether it's annoying or not, so if this is -- the objective is to redirect direct sunlight so the sun's rays go onto the ceiling, so any patterns that you see are on the ceiling, and the idea is that they never reach the occupant's eyes, which is the problem with a lot of conventional rejecting systems.

Erin Keys:
Got it. And then the second piece about the mechanical -- like, is it actually moving during the day, or how do you adjust it? Is it like a solar tracking system sort of mechanism?

Luis Fernandes:
Both the angle and the width need to be continuously adjusted. So the system is active even though it doesn't require a lot of power. So there are engineering challenges there beyond just proving that it can be done. And we have of course not done durability testing on our tabletop proof of concept. And that's something that we would like to work on with industry partners who have capabilities in these areas. So we're looking for people who can help us with that.

Alexandria Lacfi:
So Luis, it seems fairly simple to get some office building, a university office building or an office, a government office building, to just say yes to you installing this thing. It doesn't seem like a huge burden on their end. So I'm curious, before you go into thinking about manufacturing, what is the barrier? Or what's prevented you from actually installing this into an office setting and learning from that first?

Luis Fernandes:
So the prototype that we were able to build with the funding we had is fairly small. So you know, we built it so we could fit it in a suitcase. So it's not something that could span the whole width of a window and that's designed to be integrated and to be mounted like a normal blind is. So there are some engineering challenges there that we would like to just have the funding to pursue, or work with partners who will have the funding to pursue that. But you are correct that this is putting up a blind, even though the blind is automated and has a little bit more equipment. Our focus with the funding we had was in proving that this could work and building something that -- building something that did that.

Alexandria Lacfi:
Is there a potential path where you raise an additional amount of funding and then build a larger set of prototypes to then be able to install?

Luis Fernandes:
That's exactly what I would like to do next. If we had the funding to build larger prototypes, we would like to test them either in a real building or in a full-scale laboratory facility like FLEXLAB at Lawrence Berkeley Lab.

Kipp Bradford:
Great technology, great presentation, and great questions from my fellow panelists. I've heard a lot in the building space that because of the dichotomy between building owners and building occupants, energy is not a thing that people care about. The people paying rent are not the ones who are responsible for the infrastructure in the building, and the people who build the buildings are interested in charging rent, not putting up the capital investment to make energy efficiency a priority. So in that context, something like this that saves energy doesn't necessarily seem like it has a strong market. So two questions. One is, what market research have you done to disprove that thesis, number one? And number two, if the concern of the building occupants is the efficiency of their workers, that's where the dollar per square foot really plays out, then can you demonstrate not only that it doesn't reduce the efficiency of workers but demonstrate that it improves their efficiency? So really two questions about the market. What's your market and what research have you done to look at those two conflicting theses?

Luis Fernandes:
So in terms of proving that better daylight improves -- there is research on daylight and health, and some of it on daylight and productivity. And so this is a form of bringing daylight to a much greater part of the building than normally would be reached by daylight. That being said, I haven't done research particularly on proving that this system can increase the productivity of building occupants by x dollars, and I agree that would be a very compelling value proposition. So far we're relying on this sort of more general feeling that daylighting is helpful and is beneficial and it makes people happy. And if your building has a sort of dingy cubicle farm stretching as far as the eye can see, this is something that can brighten it up. And I'm sorry, the other part of your question was ...

Kipp Bradford:
I was really looking at the building owners not caring about energy efficiency.

Luis Fernandes:
I see. So it's true that there's that conflict. So if the tenant might care not only about the happiness and productivity of the people who are working there, but another angle is resilience. So if the power goes out, this system requires very little power to light a deep floor plan. So you may get, if the if the day is fairly bright, you may get an extra few hours to operate the building. And for example here in California, we have several times a year public safety power shutoffs due to fire danger, so it's less of a theoretical situation for us here. That being said, I just want to say that we're just very happy to have gotten to this proof of concept stage, and I really appreciate the suggestions of the kinds of market research that we could do.

Reshma Singh:
Thank-you, Luis. Thank-you so much, Alexandria, Kipp, and Erin. At this point I'd like the three of you to please move to your special breakout session, because this is the time you get to start judging the five innovators. So please go ahead and move to your special breakout room, and we'll move to Luis' two polls. The first poll for Luis is, was his pitch clear, compelling, and succinct? ... And his second poll, what should be the next step for Luis? And please do go to Menti, because after this we're going to do a roundup poll. The final poll from which we're going to decide the Audience Choice Award, so please do stick around on Menti, or if you haven't yet gone, please make sure you go for this last final question, which is poll number 12. So again, menti.com, use the code 10 44 687 to provide the answer so we can announce the awards coming up soon.

So the final poll reads, which innovator's technology would you invest in, or would you like for your building or home? So we're going to project the question; please go to menti.com and provide us your answers. Which innovator's technology would you invest in, or would you like for your building or home? And then stay posted for the announcement of the awards, which is going to come up shortly after a break. So this is a great time after you select your innovator, whose technology would invest in. So Erik, Wale, Elise, Steve or Luis -- give your favorite innovator a shout-out by selecting their name so they can be in the recording for the Audience Choice Award. And after you've done that, we will play the highlights video again. This might be a good time to take a stretch break and come back, because in less than five minutes we will announce two awards, the Expert Panel Best Pitch Award and the Audience Choice Award. So stay here, give yourself a nice stretch, get up, do a few yoga movements, whatever it takes, and thank-you so much for joining us, because your feedback is really going to count in this next stage of the awards. Laura, can we play the video, please?

Audio from video (repeated from earlier):
Do you have a building technology, hardware, software, publication, program or patent that you want to drive to market impact? Do you want to learn to pitch to a potential funder, co-founder, private-sector collaborator, or gain access to test labs or manufacturing partners? Introducing IMPEL+, incubating market-propelled entrepreneurial mindset at the labs and beyond, a program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and implemented by Berkeley Lab.

Reshma Singh:
OK, everybody, thank-you so much for providing your feedback for the Audience Choice Award; our judges are also ready. So this is the moment we've been waiting for. We will announce the two awards right away. So let us start with the judges' Expert Panel Award for the best pitch, which goes to ...

Mary Hubbard:
Goes to Elise Strobach from AeroShield. Congrats, Elise.

Elise Strobach:
Yeah, thank-you, and I'll just like throw out there that the preparation for this and the other cohort, you know, the other presenters today were just fantastic. And I think we all grew immensely. So thank-you so much for the feedback and for this. Really appreciate it and really excited to share this with my team.

Reshma Singh:
Great, Elise, congratulations. It is very well-deserved. You worked very hard for it, and good luck with Activate fellowship going forward. And let us know how this public and private partnership can help you achieve your goals. Congratulations again. And let's move to the second award, which Dr. Karma Sawyer is going to announce, which is the Audience Choice Award which goes to ...

Karma Sawyer:
Wale Odukomaiyo. Congratulations, Wale, take yourself off of the screen; let's see your face, hear what you have to say.

Wale Odukomaiyo:
Thank-you very much. I appreciate it. That was very unexpected. [applause sounds] Yeah, that's a great touch with the applause there. Yeah, just echoing what Elise already said, a great program. Anyone out there that's interested in doing the program, I highly recommend it. I'm happy to talk about it, as well. Feel free to reach out to me. But thank-you, Karma, thank-you, Mary, and Reshma, and my fellow innovators, and everyone who put this together, thank-you.

Reshma Singh:
Thank-you, Wale; congratulations again. So Karma, would you like to provide us with some closing comments and then we can do -- I can do a call to action right after you.

Karma Sawyer:
I will make it really quick. I just want to thank all of the innovators who participated in the IMPEL+ program this year. It has really been wonderful to see all of your excitement and growth. I hope you stay engaged with the program, and I want to give an extra thank-you and shout-out to you, Reshma, the team at LBL, and to Mary Hubbard, who have taken this little germ of an idea and made something I think really special and unique. So thank-you for bringing it into the BTO family, and I can't wait to see what comments within help us, and take it away, Reshma; give us our call to action.

Reshma Singh:
Thank-you so much, Karma, for championing this program, along with Mary and David. So as we mentioned, we have twin tracks coming up this year, a public-sector track and a private-sector track. In 2019, we had the program mostly open only to national lab staff; in 2020 we open it up to entrepreneurs and professionals, and this year we want to go the whole hog and open up to anybody who is doing buildings and energy. So we invite you to apply. Applications are open right now to participate in the IMPEL+ program. There are three workshops coming up, and then following the workshops, selected innovators will be routed to either the Accelerator at Austin Technology Incubator or to pitch events through Greentown Labs and ATI, as well as BTO and partner agency pitch events. So please apply; apply early so that we can help you impel your building and energy technologies to impact. Thank-you all for joining, and have a great rest of the day.