Young entrepreneurs battle it out

Millions of Bangladeshis with no access to electricity can take hope from projects like GreenSpark presented at the inaugural edition of the regional Wharton Innovation Tournament last week in Abu Dhabi.

The team behind GreenSpark came up with a device that produces electricity from a plant called bryophyllum to power up a 200-watt battery. Their invention was assessed by a panel of expert judges at the student entrepreneurship competition.

"The D.light battery is enough to simultaneously power two light bulbs, a small fan as well as charge a mobile telephone," said finance graduate Sabman Safad, 24. "This plant has all the right ingredients to produce electricity, and when the leaves are crushed the liquid thus produced ionises to form voltaic cells that start chemical reactions."

The process behind the invention was discovered by Professor A.K. Khan, a physicist from Jagannath University in Dhaka. Safad was hoping the top prize of Dh40,000 would power his start-up.

Global entries

The project only managed a joint third and won the GreenSpark team Dh10,000, which Safad said would go into the research and development of the technology. He was one of 12 finalists selected from 110 global entries to the competition, which culminated at the Abu Dhabi CERT Technology Park.

The tournament, created by Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, was hosted in collaboration with the Higher Colleges of Technology.

"We've run this global tournament twice in Philadelphia but this is the first time it's been held outside the US," said Professor Karl Ulrich, vice-dean of innovation at Wharton.

The competition is inspired by a book titled Innovation Tournaments by Wharton professors, Ulrich and Christian Terwiesch. The competition essentially required participants to create solutions by which society can implement new and sustainable technologies as well as customer-centric work processes. The finalists presented their business ideas based on a central theme of sustainability to a panel of judges made up of venture capitalists.

A team from Ras Al Khaimah Men's College also won Dh10,000 to finish joint third with the GreenSpark team. The RAK team's Wudu Project came up with an automated ablution machine used to limit the amount of water consumed to a minimum of 0.5 litres which compares to normal daily consumption of 15 litres per person.

"Some innovations were extremely idiosyncratic," said Ulrich. "Like the automated dispensing for ablution…which made some of the innovations really regional while others were more global."

A team from Egypt took the top prize with a project called KarmSolar presenting a plan for a start-up based on an off-grid high-capacity solar water pumping solution. The initiative envisions itself providing agri-businesses in the region with a cost-competitive alternative to unreliable and polluting diesel generators.