Innovation takes more than just an idea. But a great idea never hurts.
When I think of small business, I most often think of service industries. Businesses like restaurants and handymen, by definition, offer the labor of their staff to perform tasks that have to be performed in person to have meaning; no one in Tennessee benefits from a handyman working remotely from California. By contrast, high technology concepts make me think of big corporations in Silicon Valley, making their mark with staffs numbering in the hundreds or thousands and annual budgets higher than all the money I will make in my lifetime. But SkyNano shatters those preconceptions, and their work as a local business dedicated to innovation can show us a different side of the business world than the one we’re used to seeing.
“This started as a research project between Anna [Douglas] and I,” says Cary Pint. At the time, Pint was a professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University, where Douglas was a graduate student studying the processes behind lithium-ion batteries.
“I realized the way that we synthesize and mine the materials that make up our batteries is often a very dirty process and can undermine their use as a clean energy,” says Douglas. “So we started looking at how to synthesize carbon in a more sustainable way.”
The pair began looking into the production of carbon nanotubes, which can be created from carbon dioxide emissions and are used to produce battery components, among other applications.
“No one really knew how to tailor the structure of elemental carbon,” says Douglas. “Carbon has a really wide range in value, from basically dirt to diamond. Being able to tailor the structure really dictates its value.”
“Long story short, we were successful at pinning down the mechanisms of this process in a way that had never been done before,” says Pint. “Our technology opens the door to generate economic growth in some of the most important sectors of technology: batteries, composite materials, tires, etc., while simultaneously sequestering and using CO2 as the input for our process.”
Innovation as Business
Pint and Douglas’s research at Vanderbilt had taken them far, but the next step was an unknown for both of them.
“I didn’t actually go to grad school with intentions of founding a company, but it just felt too important to let sit on a shelf in a tech transfer office,” says Douglas. “So we said it’s time to roll up our sleeves and do something about it.”
New entrepreneurs are no stranger to business loans for opening their doors, but a tech startup has different requirements than a storefront. Thankfully, it also has unique opportunities. That first investment on the road to SkyNano came from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Innovation Crossroads program.
“I applied and was accepted to the first cohort of Innovation Crossroads,” says Douglas. “It was a lot of stars aligning, but that was really our first round of support.”
With the capital of ORNL behind them, Pint and Douglas relocated to East Tennessee and began the process of founding SkyNano. The business model of SkyNano is pretty simple: partner with other businesses with substantial carbon emissions, capture the emissions, and produce nanotubes out of the captured materials to sell to other businesses. While we might not think of nanotubes as a shelf-stock sort of item (it’s not), there is a surprising amount of demand; for instance, as Douglas explains, most black rubber products, like tires, use a carbon-based material called carbon black, which carbon nanotubes can produce.
“Our goal is not just to capture carbon dioxide, but provide a valuable product to society that can make other consumer products better and more effective while also achieving a positive outcome on our environment,” says Pint.
Right now, SkyNano is still in its early stages. All nanotube production is handled at the company’s flagship location in Louisville, but down the line, explains Douglas, they hope to be able to do production on-site at their partner locations to cut down on transportation costs and make the entire process that much more efficient.
“Our drive to improve control of the materials we produce and the energy efficiency of the process we implement leads us to aspire to be one, if not the, long term solution for CO2 emissions at the point of generation,” says Pint.
Great Minds Think Alike
For other innovators looking to enter the market, Douglas says it’s important to target an actual need in the community; she calls it the “hair-on-fire need”.
“I’ve seen people try to fit a square plug in a round hole somewhere, and it just never works,” she says. “The worst thing you can hear after pitching to an investor or potential partner is just, ‘Cool science, bro.’”
Carbon nanotubes are not a new innovation in and of themselves; some sources trace carbon nanotube experiments all the way back to the 1950s. What really made SkyNano work as a business was not a truly out-of-the-box idea, but rather making the process of bringing that idea to life more efficient, so selling them would be commercially sustainable.
“This opened the door to the formation of SkyNano and enabled our ‘secret sauce’ as we have continued to address the opportunities of scaling this up,” says Pint.
Douglas adds it’s also important to remember just how long the road to success in this sector – or any sector, really – can be.
“You know, you start a company, and everything seems like it’ll be really fast-paced, and it’s this really exciting, flashy life, with really high highs and really low lows,” says Douglas. “But you need to realize this is a marathon, not a sprint.”
For their part, however, Pint and Douglas are feeling confident about their chances – not just to make money in their business, but to make a real difference in their community and the world at large.