Green Start-Ups Compete for Impressive Prizes
Two of the biggest challenges of being a start-up – particularly one competing in the red hot green industry – is getting noticed, and getting funded. That’s why competitions – like GE’s Ecomagination Challenge – are vital to eco entrepreneurs: they promote and fund some of the world’s best and brightest ideas for sustainability. The first installment of the $200 million Challenge – the “Powering the Grid” competition, which wrapped in November – upped the ante in terms of funding. GE announced today that that it intends to acquire FMC-Tech, an Ireland-based leading provider of real-time power line monitoring technology – and one of twelve Challenge winners with the best ideas for bringing the power grid into the 21st century.
GE’s ecomagination Challenge: Powering Your Home is the most recent open call to action for businesses, entrepreneurs, innovators and students with breakthrough ideas for home energy creation, management and use.
The Challenge invited people to come together to bring ideas to the starting place of our energy future – the home.
GE will present each of five innovation challenge award recipients with $100,000 in cash, for a total of $500,000, to acknowledge these entries as examples of outstanding entrepreneurship and innovation.
Judges may also award one or more entrant:
- GE Scientific Merit Award to work with the GRC
The evaluation committee considered one or more of the following for selected entrants:
- An equity investment by GE or others
- A cooperative agreement to develop a product or technology
- A review of your product or service for possible qualification to be a part of the GE ecomagination program
Selected ecomagination Challenge entrants were offered the opportunity to develop a commercial relationship with GE through:
- Investment: the $200 million capital pledge of GE and its partners will be invested globally into promising start-ups and ideas
- Validation: evaluation of entrant’s business strategy through in-depth discussions with GE‘s technical and commercial teams
- Distribution: exploration of partnership opportunities with GE to scale a business and create global reach
- Development: leveraging of GE‘s technical infrastructure and GE Global Research Centers to accelerate technology and product development
- Growth: exploration of opportunities for utilizing existing GE customer relationships for your go-to-market strategy
The Challenge, launched in collaboration with leading venture capital firms RockPort Capital, KPCB, Foundation Capital, Emerald Technology Ventures, and Carbon Trust is part of GE’s ecomagination initiative, a global commitment to build innovative clean energy technologies and will help fund the most promising ideas.
For more info please go to: http://www.gereports.com/crowdsourcing-smart-grid-tech-backed-with-cash/
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