Innovation

The innovative work of The Lemelson Foundation and some of our grantees – including RAMP India’s Dr. Sathya Jeganathan, SELCO-India, and Kickstart – was showcased on Voice of America’s (VOA) English language stations around the world recently. The story, which features Lemelson Foundation Executive Director Julia Novy-Hildesley, is now available on VOA’s website. Read the…

Solar lamps designed and distributed by former NCIIA E-team Greenlight Planet are lighting up the lives of people in rural India, as reported yesterday in The Wall Street Journal. Greenlight Planet was started as a E-Team by students at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to develop a solar-charged, battery powered LED lantern for use in India and China. The…

RAMP India innovator K. Vivekanandan was featured last week in The Hindu, the national newspaper of India. Vivekanandan’s innovation is a modified pin pulverizer for grinding spices in rural villages. The technology eliminates the need for villagers to travel long distances to find similar machines, which require too much energy and are too expensive for use…

Cambridge, Mass., – The Lemelson-MIT Program yesterday announced 15 teams of high school students, teachers and mentors selected to participate in the 2009-2010 InvenTeam initiative. The teams will pursue year-long invention projects and be provided with hands-on access to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education. The Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam initiative is a national grants program designed to excite…

The latest issue of TIME magazine features their annual special report on community service, including their Community Service 2009 list of “Responsibility Pioneers” – companies and organizations (big and small) that are changing the world. Among the 25 listed are four that are either grantees or fellow philanthropies that the Lemelson Foundation works directly with: Living Goods–More

The Solar Ear project, developed by Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow Howard Weinstein, has been selected as one of 15 initiatives for a Tech Award. The project, which pairs a low-cost hearing aid solution with a solar charger, was featured online today by Fast Company’s Ariel Schwartz. You can read the article here. About The Tech Awards The Tech Awards is an…

Add another accolade to the growing list about Ecovative, the company that is using mushrooms and other organic materials for a drop-in replacement to styrofoam. The company, recently highlighted in Popular Science, was last week featured on CNN.com’s “Young People Who Rock” blog as well as on a CNN.com Live Interview with 24-year-old founders/innovators Eben…

Among the winners announced today for The Wall Street Journal 2009 Technology Innovation Awards was recent Lemelson-MIT Sustainability winner Joel Selanikio and his company DataDyne. The nonprofit was picked from more than 500 entries for their free EpiSurveyor software that helps health care officials in developing countries use mobile devices to collect data on immunization rates, vaccine…

Showcasing how youth can make a difference in the world, the winners of the 2009 Invent Your World Challenge are already hard at work showing off their inventions. Overall winner Javier Fernández-Han, 15, and his VERSATILE system has been featured in a variety of news articles, including Inhabitant.com and Instructables.com. The VERSATILE system is an algae-powered energy system…

Designing a Global Geothermal Challenge August 20, 2009 – With the understanding that the possibilities of geothermal technology have not yet been fully realized and the intent of addressing energy security, the Foundation for Geothermal Innovation (FGI) and the Lemelson Foundation have released initial findings defining the technical criteria for a critical new generation of geothermal…

Mr Shivakumar, one of the first shepherds to adopt the system, has already seen some encouraging results. An innovation from the RAMP program in India is the focus of an article in July’s issue of the online magazine New Agriculturist.The innovation combines a product with a service for nomadic sheepherders and their flocks in southern India. This…

Cambridge, Mass.  – When it comes to solving complex problems, Geoffrey von Maltzahn, MIT graduate student and biomedical engineer, looks to nature for solutions. Finding inspiration in systems that evolution has produced, von Maltzahn is currently helping to tackle one of society’s biggest challenges: improving tumor detection and therapeutic delivery in order to boost the…