Sweden’s forests could the be the source for batteries and more. (Photo: David Callahan)
Your car, home and even your clothes could one day soon be outfitted with soft, squishy and shock-proof batteries that are made from — wait for it — trees. Researchers at KTH’s Wallenberg Wood Science Center (WWSC) used wood-based nanocellulose for this latest breakthrough, which dramatically expands the storage capacity of batteries.
“It is possible to make incredible materials from trees and cellulose,” says Max Hamedi, who is a researcher at KTH and Harvard University.
The battery looks like an ordinary piece of foam. It’s actually aerogel made from wood pulp cellulose, which the researchers treated with electronic properties. One of the biggest advantages of the new material is that it allows three-dimensional structures for batteries, which means packing more juice into a smaller space.
If you think about how a pair of human lungs can cover a football field when they’re unfurled, then you get the idea of what a foamy battery can do. If spread out, a single cubic decimeter of the battery material would cover most of a football pitch, says Hamedi.
“There are limits to how thin a battery can be, but that becomes less relevant in 3D, ” Hamedi says. “We are no longer restricted to two dimensions. We can build in three dimensions, enabling us to fit more electronics in a smaller space.”
Interested in what more can be done with wood? Check out the latest edition of Crosstalks, which features a panel of experts on wood science.
What Stockholm’s inner city could wind up looking like if we do nothing. (Image: Post Car(d) Urbanism)
Maybe it’s not as bad as “Soylent Green”; but it still doesn’t sound very appealing.
“The economy recovered from that early recession – but at the cost of citizen trust in the government. Investors and business people grew protective of their assets, and everyone scrambled to create wealth. Only a few were successful …”
These are not the opening lines of some dystopian science fiction novel. They’re from a crowdsourced vision of what inner Stockholm could become by 2050, if current trends are allowed to run amok: the city is reduced to a corporate-branded playground for the rich, choked with automobile traffic and crumbling infrastructure. And good luck waiting for the bus.
This scenario, and other more heartening alternatives, were compiled by the Post Car(d) Urbanism project at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. And even though they pertain to Stockholm, you could also look at Post Car(d) Urbanism’s multiple outcomes as a warning — and opportunity — for most mature cities around the world.
The lead researcher, Alexander Ståhle, explains that the visions of the future were compiled based on trends sourced from 400 city and transportation experts. Using this data, they came up with three possible scenarios each for the inner city, inner suburbs and outer suburbs. Then they presented the nine scenarios to the public to vote on what they prefer.
Happily, most people voted against the scenario where automobile use is left to run its natural course, at the expense of public space and healthy urban life. The more popular scenarios had a technology and environmental influence, which shows me that people really don’t believe that auto-centric lifestyles are sustainable over the long haul.
And, it indicates that public investment in planning will continue to be supported as long as the ideas create opportunities for all to enjoy a reasonable quality of life in what is bound to become a very crowded world.
From left, My Klint (KTH Student Inc.), Sean Eyler (Biome), Andy Johnston (Moor Capital) and Jennifer Broutin Farah (Sproutsio)
Is startup entrepreneurship in danger of losing technology depth? Maybe not, but some of the experts here at the FOUNDER.org World Founder Forum agree that there is a trending lack of research-connected business ideas. Or at least, they’re not getting the attention that the more low-tech ideas do.
“More people are chasing the fast track to creating a huge startup, so they are more focused on solutions similar to, for example, Snapchat and WhatsApp, and not that focused on research,” says My Klint, manager of KTH Student Inc., an incubator for student startups at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. “There are many cool startups who have made it very fast, and that’s become the role model.”
Andy Johnston, a partner at Moor Capital and an expert panelist at the Forum, agrees. “Somehow people got the idea that engineering has become easier, because we have cloud and all of these really powerful midware stacks and so on,” he says. “Maybe the typical startup today has more people who are business-savvy, and more funding-savvy, and more product-centric, and less like engineers than they had before.”
“There’s a lot of deep tech here in Sweden but a lot of the ideas we see as VCs are more product-focused, more scaled-business-model focused,” Johnston says. “And I think that’s a pity. So, we’re actively looking for more of the deep tech companies.”
What could turn the trend around would be more role models like KTH’s Volumental, which was one of the Class of 2015 companies that FOUNDER.org awarded 100,000 USD in startup funds. One of that company’s is a robotics researcher who has worked in the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Computer Vision Group.
Jennifer Broutin Farah of Sproutsio, an MIT startup, says that the tide appears to be shifting toward more engineering-based business ideas. “There is a shift toward, ‘Maybe you have the app but you also need a hardware component’. I think a lot of interesting things are starting to come out of universities.”
But Klint reminds us that all engineering and no business background makes for an unbalanced company, nevertheless. “At KTH Innovation we have started to recruit external and experienced entrepreneurs to add them to our deep tech teams, to make sure we commercialize the solutions we have here.”
What do you do with an education if there are no jobs? You make your own.
That’s the opinion of nearly a third of the students in the U.S. who face unemployment after graduation, says Michael Baum, an enormously successful tech entrepreneur (he founded Splunk) who is the driving force behind FOUNDER.org.
This is no small segment of society, Baum says, estimating that half of graduates are dealing with unemployment.
But the reality is only a small portion of them try to start a business, he says. What’s stopping them?
“We hear three things,” Baum says. “I’m in debt. I don’t know how to build a company, how to fundraise or build a business plan. And I’m not really sure I have what it takes to be successful.”
Baum is in Stockholm this week to preside over the FOUNDER.org World Founder Forum at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The event brings together dozens of the FOUNDER.org network’s top student entrepreneur teams for a few days of knowledge sharing and networking. And it culminates in the announcement of 10 winning teams who will take home 100K USD in startup funds.
Youth unemployment was the main concern driving Baum to create FOUNDER.org. The network combines funding with a company building program based on intense challenges, real-world skills development and shared experiences among the most talented young founders around the world. Watching him at the Monday event, you can see how much he loves doing this. And he’s impressed with the energy of the generation that he’s helping. “This is a generation that has been given a lot of things, but they also have very high expectations of themselves. These are people that are quite intense about making the world a better place.”
And they see entrepreneurship as a way to balance their need to make a paycheck and to remaining true to their commitment to a better world, he says. “And they’re faced with doing that in a failing system.”
The pace of change continues to shift faster than anyone can foresee, so entrepreneurship is a tough calling. Baum’s advice: “It’s a tough environment, but it’s also an opportunist environment to work in. Probably the biggest thing you can learn in life is how to adjust to change, how to incorporate change.”
You can follow today’s event on Twitter under the tag, #wff15.
Presented at last year’s Founder World Forum, the FOUNDER.org Class of 2015 winners of the USD 100K prize, including KTH startup, Volumental. (Photo: FOUNDER.org)
What if you put 100,000 dollars in start-up funds on the table and asked students to come up with a business case for it? Better yet, what if those students were picked from the top talent at the world’s leading universities, and got to develop their ideas through a year-long mentorship program under the guidance of some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs.
Now you’re talking about excitement. That’s exactly what’s going to be happening on Monday during the FOUNDER.org World Founder Forum at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The forum brings together entrepreneurial teams from 28 universities, including KTH, to share knowledge, inspire each other and then present their business cases to the public. At the conclusion of Monday’s session, 10 winning teams will be announced. Each one will walk away with a 100,000 USD startup grant.
We’ll be live blogging all day from the Forum. Follow the feed on twitter at #wff15, and keep tuned to the Stockholm Technology Blog for other updates.
When KTH Royal Institute of Technology started its collaboration with FOUNDER.org. last year, it became the first Scandinavian university in the global network, which had already been supporting the commercialization of research and student ideas at the world’s top universities. KTH also produced one of the 10 winning teams, Volumental, in its first year as a FOUNDER.org partner.
FOUNDER.org’s founder, Michael Baum, loves the idea of bringing the forum to Sweden. “Stockholm is full of innovation and life,” he says. “Midsummer is the perfect time to be in Stockholm and provide our founders from all over the world the chance to experience the beauty of Sweden.
“In addition we have an amazing school partnership with KTH and three great companies in Stockholm including Short Cut Labs, Tinitell and Volumental.”
David Callahan
Here’s a video from last year’s World Founder Forum
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