LightWorks® Innovation Accelerator
Multidisciplinary effort to leverage ASU’s unique strengths in areas of: Solar electric, sustainable fuels and products, energy and society, food systems energy and water nexus.
Innovation Accelerator solutions
Design thinking and innovation
The LightWorks® Innovation Accelerator aligns the value propositions of companies with reliable experts, tools and frameworks that meet their research and development needs. Few challenges are more fundamental to our society than ensuring the sustainability of current and future generations. As a result, we have developed a model which addresses some of the challenges of creating offers that companies may be willing to co-fund with ASU either directly or in partnership with others.
Building a pipeline
The Accelerator is a hybrid model which links ‘user needs’ to faculty ‘ideas and insights,’ thus improving the scale and impact on sustainability and energy challenges. We use traditional customer engagement but our differentiation is our ability to conceptualize the need, be imaginative in our engagement and deliver a linked solution relevant to the original challenge.
Impact through development to scale
The Accelerator reduces ASU faculty time required to ‘chase’ these non-traditional research projects by at least 25%. Our Accelerator research partners also benefit from a strong relationship based on links to their outcomes. Our objective is to improve the quality of interactions so that our customers feel that they must talk with ASU. Importantly, our objective is to eventually connect each customer to several relevant research themes inside ASU.
Innovation Accelerator highlights
Microbial communities
Algae, biomass and wastewater research
Restoring the carbon balance
CO2 technology, policy, and solutions
Clean energy transition
Military resiliency, innovation and training
LightSpeed Solutions
Recycling CO2 into sustainable fuels and products
What we do
Link digital humanities with science and tech
Leverage insights with research partners
Create collaborative communities
Data driven commercialization
Our mission
Our mission is to strategically integrate promising technology and ideas with seed funding, market assessments and economic analysis, thus constantly prioritizing ideas with real world application and a viable business model.
Featured webinars
How Companies and Municipalities are Using Digital Technologies to Meet Their Carbon Reduction Commitments
The second webinar in the ASU LightWorks® four-part series on “How Smart Systems Can Power Our Decarbonized Future” explores how to bring systems thinking into the design of programs to decarbonize industrial processes and municipal systems.
Better Food, Less Carbon in the New Digital Economy
An ASU webinar recording. Traditional agriculture provides a meaningful opportunity to impact greenhouse gases and biodiversity. The agriculture ecosystem comprises land use, crop production, livestock and fisheries, and the food supply chain. In this system lies meaningful, measurable, and sustainable regenerative applications that can greatly reduce the impact of agriculture on the planet.
Prove I Made a Low Carbon Choice – Can smart systems do this?
Join Microsoft, SingualityNET, ESGAnalytics.Ai and ASU global leaders in a frank and lively 90-minute discussion about the challenges and drivers underlying artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to trustworthy carbon choices. How can smart systems help lead society to a healthier planet and advance social wellbeing?
Innovation Accelerator personnel
William Brandt
Senior Global Futures Scientist, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory
bill.brandt@asu.edu
561-319-8293
Ellen Stechel
Co-Director, LightWorks®, Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation
ellen.stechel@asu.edu
480-965-1657
Travis Johnson
Associate Director, LightWorks®, Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation
travis.a.johnson@asu.edu
480-965-3326
Denise Rowe
Denise.Rowe@asu.edu
480-727-3862