Kristina Johnson of the U.S. Department of Energy closed her morning presentation with a photo of Earth, encouraging attendees to reflect on its future and what we’re doing to sustain it. Photo by Danny Schreiber.
If I had to imagine what participation in a Washington think tank would be like, I’d recollect my experience at last Wednesday’s Regional Energy Innovation Summit at the Gallup Organization’s Omaha campus, a follow up of the Energy Innovation Summit that took place May 7 at the White House.
Thanks to a partnership between Gallup, the White House, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the City of Omaha, HDR, and others, nearly 200 attendees gathered from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., June 16, for an intense day of presentations, panels, and discussions. Leading the group as the event emcee and serving as the connector to bringing the Summit to Omaha was Howard W. Buffett, policy advisor in the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Partnership.
Thanks to our sponsor
“A lot of this started with a luncheon conversation just kicking the tires on something,” said Omaha Mayor Jim Suttle when asked how the event landed in Omaha. “[Howard Buffett] was able to work with his employer, the Obama administration, to take an idea and begin to put it into reality.”
And it was the idea-to-reality mentality that served as an underlying theme. In the first panel of the day, Jim Clifton, CEO of the Gallup Organization, summed it up well. “Entrepreneurship is more needed than innovation.”
With entrepreneurs in mind, Kauffman’s Lesa Mitchell did a fine job of setting the tone for the importance of entrepreneurship by sharing some of the latest Kauffman research and presenting the video for their Entrepreneur’s Pledge initiative.
Ginger Lew of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and Mayor Suttle also gave opening remarks. Lew reassured attendees that the White House is committed to working with entrepreneurs and investors in the months following the series of regional Energy Innovation Summits. “Your recommendations will not just fall into a black hole,” she said. “[The White House] is actively engaged in these meetings.”
Kristina Johnson, Under Secretary for Energy at the Department of Energy, provided the morning keynote presentation. She called on her background in engineering to begin her talk, stating that engineers solve problems under constraints and here are the constraints the government is facing:
- Cost: Budget is less than what is needed
- Speed: 2 degree Celsius increase in global mean temp above 1990 levels poses “significant risks” for ecosystems
- Scale: Decades-old electric grid; increase in oil dependence; decline of U.S. manufacturing energy workforce small business financing
Following Johnson was a panel moderated by Mitchell titled Supplying Regional Innovation in Energy. Here are the panelists as well as summaries of their opening remarks.
Mayor Suttle: When preparing for the election, he learned that “citizens of this community were interested in energy conservation.” With that in mind, he factored it into his plan. Now, the City has been successful in securing a grant for an energy efficiency master plan and a partnership with Lincoln.
Lew: She spoke about regional innovation clusters: “How can we help regions scale up their economic development and economic revitalization efforts by looking beyond political boundaries?” “Business locating into a community look beyond political boundaries,” they look to support and supply chain of the cities. The Obama administration has looked at this – how can we take R&D at university and labs and bring them to market at a fast level? We can’t afford a 30 year time line: “We spend a 150 billion dollars on federal research,” and there’s a need to find a path forward on how we commercialize it faster and more efficiently.
Clifton: He began saying, “I’ll be the representative of free enterprise.” He then reflected on the gross domestic products of Japan, China and the U.S. and a projection that the U.S. would fall behind. Contrary to what was projected, the U.S. didn’t fall, instead it became bigger than the other two combined. He then reflected on the start of the internet and Vint Cerf and Al Gore‘s role in it. He feels that the internet may have “saved the Republic” because of the increase in commercialization it brought. He ended on the argument that “entrepreneurship is more needed than innovation.”
Amy Francetic, managing director of Invention Bridge: She talked about how she created Invention Bridge to take advantage of the terrific research and development she saw was present in the Midwest. “How do we take the R&D and turn it into technologies?” She learned that they have to be flexible in the commercialization path. They’re trying to bring the market perspective much earlier in the process, e.g. bringing a consumer in to say “I can use this, this is how I will use it.” They’ve formed the Clean Energy Trust in Chicago to do a bottoms up analysis to see how they play to their strength and invest in ventures with a competitive advantage and align those with the right parties to make Illinois a center of innovation. “It’s a slow process but it’s a labor of love.” She grew up in the Midwest, left to pursue other opportunities and has now returned to raise her family.
Massoud Amin, director of the Technological Leadership Institute of University of Minnesota: When we look at the challenges ahead we need a 360 systems view. Have a clear mission and then work out the details of it, e.g. cure cancer or land on the moon. He shared his experience bringing technology developed at a university to market.
To kick off the panel Q&A, Mitchell asked Clifton, “What more do we need than money?” He replied, “They’re betting on the wrong thing, they need to bet on the people.” Using Meg Whitman, founder of eBay, as an example, he said that these types of people are really rare. Amin echoed his thoughts by posing the question, “What’s more important than the machine? The human being, but they are unpredictable, even so, you much first choose the person.”
The event continued by featuring Ted Zoller, executive director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, over the lunch hour. He gave a fascinating presentation on the human networks that make up a region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. I’ll be publishing a video interview with him later this week.
The afternoon contained two breakout sessions for a total of four panels. The titles of the panels were as follows:
- Early adopter of energy innovation: the role of state-level policy in making markets
- Regional gap funding
- Cross-sector partnerships
- The human capital for energy innovation
We were honored to have our co-founder Jeff Slobotski participate in the third breakout (below, sitting middle). To find the full schedule, see our post: Energy Innovation Summit at Gallup this Wednesday, June 16.
Photo by Danny Schreiber
Overall, it was a well-executed event that brought together a good number of thought leaders from a variety of entities. As I opened this post stating that I saw this as a “think tank,” I’d close it with the same thought. Even as I was recapping the day’s events, I was conceptualizing new ideas and tactics that could push energy innovation forward.
To help facilitate connections among energy innovators in the months to come, the Kauffman Foundation has created the Energy Innovation Network to help entrepreneurs connect with researchers to develop new technologies, assist startups in finding customers and connect public and private entities, share policy and other information.
Here are a couple interviews I grabbed while at the conference. The first is with Howard Buffett. I asked him about his role in the White House, the background of the event and where it’s headed in the future. I also asked him about a recent Lincoln Journal Star article which quoted him to say that he intends to move back to Nebraska in the coming years.
This second interview is with Mayor Suttle. I asked him about Omaha as a regional site for the Summit as well as what Omaha is doing to support entrepreneurship.
Here are links to other writeups of the event, beginning with the most recent:
- June 17, The White House Blog: Partnerships for Regional Energy Innovation in Omaha, Nebraska
- June 16, Kauffman.org: Clean Energy Leaders Discuss Innovation at First Regional Summit as Offshoot of White House Conference
- May 10, The White House Blog: Promoting Partnerships for Innovation in Energy
- May 7, The White House Blog: Advancing Energy Innovation through Cross-Sector Partnerships
