March 9th 2005 • Printer version

Technology Entrepreneurship Fellows teams win $51,000

Jones and his team developed a battery substitute that, in his words lives forever. Glassonís team will introduce an environmentally-friendly technology that removes arsenic from waste wood products.

Both are Technology Entrepreneurship Fellows, part of a collaborative effort between the UO business and law schools, the UO Office of Technology Transfer and Pacific Northwest National Laboratories of Richland, Washington. 

Both teams have been invited to the international 2005 Moot Corp.  - a kind of Super Bowl of world business plan competitions - held at the University of Texas in May. The 20-year old competition is based on the law student Moot Court model (which certainly ought to give Jones and Glasson an edge).

Perpetua Harvester
Clayton  Jones and team members from the business school - Jed Cahill, Jon Hofmeister, Lars Juel, and Mason Adair - have developed the Perpetua "Harvester", a battery substitute that generates electricity using naturally occurring differences in temperature and offers an extremely long-life power source for small devices. In its business plan, Perpetua focused on markets in which the total cost of battery ownership is exceptionally high.

Jones, who has a background in biotechnology, engineering, and business is working on a joint J.D./M.B.A. degree at the UO. He said, The Perpetua Harvester will initially be installed in wireless sensor networks monitoring the structural health of bridges and pipelines throughout the United States. From there, the possibilities are limited only by the imagination.

Jones is interested in entrepreneurship and business law and plans a legal career working primarily with start-up and emerging growth companies.

CleanSmart
Will Glasson and his teammates from the business school, David Grove and Eric Brunsvold, are addressing the problem of lumber pressure-treated with chromate copper arsenic (CCA). Used in decks, fences and the like, pressure-treated lumber all over the world is decaying at a fast rate and entering land fills. Itís a huge environmental problem, Glasson says, The amount of arsenic contained in the predicted future volume of treated waste wood is enough to kill everyone on this planet.

The team claims benefits to waste management customers include lower costs, greatly reduced liability, and a vehicle for being more environmentally responsible.

CleanSmart's market entry is focused upon Norway, and then the European Union, where CCA is classified as hazardous waste with restricted use and disposal and where companies already pay for cleanup. The team projects that revenue will be based on treatment services, reselling component materials and consulting.

Glasson is interested in corporate transactional work and wants to nurture technology ventures that offer an alternative to harmful or unsustainable industrial practices. He said I would love to be one of the people who make Oregon the next technology small business stronghold!

Technology Entrepreneurship Fellows
The Law Schoolís Center for Law and Entrepreneurship (CLE) partnered with the business schoolís Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (PNNL) in this four-year old initiative in which teams of law and business students evaluate, develop, finance and launch high-tech start up businesses.

Law professor Barbara Aldave, who co-designed the TEF program, said, It immerses our students in all of the challenges- and frustrations of transforming a raw technology into a market-ready business opportunity.

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