Innova Materials : Solving water problems in the developing world

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Team Innova

CEans,

Engineers are special. Engineers have been known to solve the complex problems of the world & making it a better place to live. Some time back, four brilliant engineers joined hands with each other to solve the water problems of the developing countries. They have brilliant ideas, they have a plan, they have necessary skills & they are good at execution! No wonder they bagged 3 out of 5 top prizes at Wharton Business Plan Competition! Yes, they are Team Innova Materials!

CrazyEngineers is extremely proud to have Alex, Priyanka, Arjun & Calvin of Innova Materials. They are changing the world and they want you stay crazy & change the world with them. Check out our Small Talk with Team Innova Materials:-

CE: Hi Alex, could you please introduce your team to us?

IM: Sure! For starters, we all love technology and engineering and are engineers ourselves, one of the strongest common threads amongst the team. But beyond that, we each bring something a little different to the table. For example, I come in with leadership and management experience having founded another technology company, Crederity, as well as knowledge from work in business, nonprofit, and tech that helps in communicating and relating Innova Materials’ platform technology to the people we encounter in the real world. Priyanka Agarwal is originally from Mumbai and has worked with Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Company, and Nano-Tex, learning what makes both mature and growth companies in India and in the US tick. Arjun Srinivas speaks the language of both Wall Street, having spent time with Susquehanna Private Equity and the Livingston Group, and technology, having worked in nanotech-focused research labs around the US. Calvin Peng brings a disciplined, quantitative dimension to Innova’s decision making processes, drawing from his work at BCG, UCSB and elsewhere. Rounding it out, we also have a couple of very important interns who are starting to take on more responsibility, including Michael Young of Stanford University (Electrical Engineering).

CE: What’s the secret behind your team’s name, ‘Innova’?

IM: There’s a secret? I guess we shouldn’t tell then! But seriously, we wanted our name to reflect that we are talking about re-inventing how people can use materials. Plastics and rubbers changed the world in the 20th century mainly due to their structural properties, low cost, and easy processing. Innova Materials is giving innovators in the 21st century the means to re-imagine what these polymers can do and forever change the way we interact with plastics and rubbers.

CE: What does Team Innova do?

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Alex

IM: Fair question. Innova Materials has developed a platform technology called Innlaytm which can be used by product manufacturers to functionalize the surfaces of plastic and rubber products by directly embedding nanoscale or microscale materials into the product surfaces. This can enable all sorts of product enhancements in the real world—medical equipment and devices that can’t grow bacteria on them, low-energy digital displays powered by nanowires or nanotubes, ultra low-cost diagnostic biosensors and labs-on-a-chip, and more. On a day-to-day basis, we conduct R&D and prototyping work, interact with current and potential partners and clients, engage in various business development tasks, and generally have a lot of fun doing it all.

CE: Your initial challenge was to develop a low cost solution for water quality problems in the developing world. What are the problems associated with quality of water in the developing world?

IM: The problems are very dire, but I’m hopeful that they’ll be addressed in the coming decade as the global community begins to recognize that water quality issues are solvable and worth solving. The current statistics are horrible, however. 42,000 people die every week from water-borne diseases, the vast majority of them children, and pretty much all of those deaths avoidable through the practice of basic sanitation hygiene and the application of basic technology. Although I spent a few years running Penn Engineers without Borders and focused our efforts on water quality issues, I would still defer to persons more deeply involved in this area on a day to day basis for a complete answer. A great starting point is International Decade for Action 'Water for Life' 2005-2015.


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Arjun

CE: Can you tell us more about the process Innlayâ„¢? What would you call the advantages and short comings?

IM: The strongest differentiators of the Innlay process are cost-effectiveness and performance. There are of course other ways to impart plastic surfaces with new properties—incorporation of additives and masterbatches into the entire resin mix, coating, chemical vapor deposition—but all of these methods waste time, energy, and material, and often don’t result in the level of performance possible with Innlay since our process directly embeds active material into surfaces. Another significant advantage is that Innlay is a post-manufacturing spray process, so product manufacturers don’t need to change existing processes to adopt it. One shortcoming of Innlay actually comes about from the fact that it’s a new process. As is often the case, one can expect there to be inertia in the market to stick with what has been practiced in the past. We’re addressing this in a couple ways. We’re using the technology in a promotional product, IonArmour Clean Hydration (#-Link-Snipped-#), as a demo of Innlay’s commercial viability. We also are enhancing samples for product manufacturers at no cost to them so they can preview the advantages of Innlay first-hand. And we are getting out into the real world and talking first-hand with researchers, business leaders, and other parties (including CE!).

CE: You have recently swept the awards at the Wharton Business Plan Competition. Could you tell us more about it?

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Priyanka

IM: That was an exciting day for Innova Materials. Actually, the competition itself ran over the course of a few months, but culminated in the Venture Finals, a single day where the top 8 teams, filtered down by a panel of dozens of VCs, engineers, professors, and others, vyed for the WBPC’s top awards. We walked away with $30,000 and 3 of the competition’s 5 top awards, but I think the greatest asset we took away from the competition was the insight of top entrepreneurs and investors who served as judges of the competition and the people we met and continue to meet thanks to the event. It was also nice to see our business model receive validation from the judging panel.

CE: You have made a claim to have imparted permanent anti-microbial treatment to the inside of pipes. Could you tell us more about it and how did you managed to achieve it?

IM: A couple years ago I was in Terreritos, Honduras with Engineers without Borders, building a water system with the villagers to bring running water from a spring to the village homes. While there did not appear to be significant water quality problems at the source itself, it became apparent that contamination of the water in transit could become a problem. While filtration at the point of use would address this, it was clear that a way to avoid contamination in transit, or even a way to purify water in transit, would be of great value. I did research and discovered that bacterial growth in plastic pipes is a problem not just in the developing world, but has even caused deaths in supposedly modernized countries such as the US. The idea to create plastic pipe permanently embedded with antimicrobials and other beneficial particles on the pipe interior became the topic of a final paper I wrote for a sustainable development course I helped initiate at the University of Pennsylvania. This then became the topic of my teammate’s and my engineering thesis work at Penn. Working out of the Materials Science department at Penn, we built functional prototypes which went on to pass independently-conducted ASTM test for antimicrobial efficacy with results better than anyone expected (99.99%+ efficacy).



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Calvin

CE: Innlay™ indeed might be considered as one of the engineering marvels. How did you come up with the idea of developing such a surface coat (if I may call it) polymer? Or may I put it this way. “How are you re-imagining polymers?

IM: We prefer the term “surface enhancement” instead of “surface coating” because the end result and the process itself is markedly different from coating. As for the origins, the process originated from my experience out in Honduras (see above), so in a sense it came about by accident since neither I nor my teammates intended to produce a universal method of functionalizing plastic surfaces when we set out to create plastic pipe embedded with antimicrobials. We’re now making it possible for manufacturers to easily and cost-effectively make plastic and rubber materials do interesting and valuable things that they were never meant to do. For example making plastics kill bacteria and mold, power low-cost flat-screen TVs, catalyze harmful pollutants in the environment into less harmful compounds, enable cell phones that smell like strawberries or chocolate (or both), bind DNA and other biomolecules to enable early detection and treatment of disease, and so forth. We are currently in discussions with a variety of companies looking to benefit from Innlay, from those looking to break the mold out of the gates with game-changing technologies, to companies simply looking for new market opportunities.

CE: How is it different from the traditional ways of coating?

IM: Coating plastic is not straightforward. Coating typically is not as simple as taking a sprayer, spraying some solution onto the plastic, and letting it air dry (which is about the level of complexity of Innlay, BTW). To impart new properties to a surface via coating, a secondary matrix material that must be carefully selected is deposited on top of the plastic, throughout which is mixed some sort of surface-active functional material (e.g. an antimicrobial). However, an initial binding / adhesion promotion layer is often required. Sometimes, various other basecoats and topcoats are required. Finally, the various layers must be cured, which involves time and energy. The net result can be a lot of lead R&D time to develop an effective coating on a product-by-product basis, wasted energy, time, and materials spent on multiple processing steps, wasted surface-active material which never makes contact with the product surface, changes to product surface properties, and surface enhancements that are subject to peeling and other durability problems encountered when you have composite interfacing layers as with coatings. Unlike coating, Innlay does not layer surface-active material on top of products within secondary matrices, but instead embeds the surface-active material directly into the product surface without chemically or otherwise altering the surface itself. This means Innlay fundamentally overcomes the shortcomings of coating, and as a single-step process, is far easier to perform than coating.

CE: What are various applications of your product?

IM: I’ve mentioned a few throughout this chat—antimicrobial plastics, flexible, transparent, low-cost digital displays, inexpensive biosensors and lab-on-a-chip technology, consumer products like digital media players and cell phones that are fragranced, catalysts to remove pollutants from the air and water. As a platform technology, Innlay can be applied in many meaningful ways, and we are always on the lookout for partners who we can use Innlay to embed nanoscale or microscale materials into polymer surfaces to accomplish novel or improved utility.

CE: Considering the fact that your innovation is aimed at solving water quality problems in developing countries, what are the costs involved in deploying your solution?

IM: Even back when this technology was still our thesis work, our selection parameters when assessing various means by which to enhance polymer surfaces included cost as a prominent parameter upon which to optimize. So cost considerations have always been of paramount concern to us. In fact, the relatively high cost of plastic surface enhancement via coating and other existing means is an opportunity for Innlay. Anyway, the main costs involve the cost of the solution which the Innlay process uses, the cost of the surface-active material being applied via the process, the equipment that the process uses, the energy the process uses, and the machine or human time required to use the process. Because the ingredients of the solution and the equipment required are mostly commoditized, and because the process is less time and labor intensive than coating, these costs are kept in check and make it feasible to use Innlay in the real world—whether in developing or developed countries.

CE: Now that you have already applied for a patent, what next?

IM: The closing of our seed round of financing, further expansion and protection of our IP portfolio, the launch of our promotional demonstration product line (#-Link-Snipped-#), more deals lined up with paying customers and partners, and explorations of what new technologies and products we can enable and what existing technologies and products we can make more efficient with Innlay.

CE: What initiatives you would take to encourage budding engineers who might want to work with you?

IM: We love engineering students and recent grads (and can definitely relate, having recently been engineering students ourselves). If you’re interested in chatting, drop us an email and let us know you read about us at CE. We may not have a position available in the short-term, but we’ll certainly keep you in mind for the future.

CE: Many thanks for talking to us. What message would you like to give to our CEans?

IM: Stay crazy! Where there is a will to make something better, faster, stronger, cheaper, there is a way.
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CrazyEngineers is thankful to Team Innova Materials for Small Talk with us. Find out more about Innova Materials at #-Link-Snipped-#

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