UC Berkeley MBA Students Partner With National Lab Scientists to Commercialize Clean Tech

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Mon Dec 1 12:43:15 2008 Pacific Time

BERKELEY, Calif., Dec. 1 (AScribe Newswire) -- Bringing clean tech innovations into the market place faster is the purpose of a new partnership launched this fall between scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and students of the Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative (BERC), an interdisciplinary organization founded by MBA students at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

Bringing clean technology innovations into the market place faster is the purpose of a new partnership launched this fall between scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and students of the Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative (BERC), an interdisciplinary organization founded by MBA students at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

"Our students have developed a new model of collaboration across disciplines that can break through the bottlenecks that have so often prevented technology transfer from our labs and research centers into the commercial sector," says Jay Stowsky, Haas School senior assistant dean for instruction and former senior economist for science and technology with the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

This is the kind of business process innovation "that can help jump-start sustainable new businesses and industries - something our economy needs dearly right now," Stowsky says.

The partnership called "Cleantech to Market" has already dispatched five cross-disciplinary student teams to evaluate the commercial viability of clean technologies under development at LBNL.

Armed with perspectives from business, law, public policy, engineering, and molecular biology, the students are assessing technologies that include a novel solar-chemical storage device, a breakthrough fabrication method for high-efficiency solid-state photovoltaic devices, and the use of ionic liquids to pre-treat biomass for conversion to biofuel.

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