Innovation Needs to Belong to the Small

Will the US Stimulus Bill Prove the Savior for Nanotech? is an IEEE Spectrum's Tech Talk commentary, under which I submitted the following letter to the blog owner:

Mr. Alan B. Shalleck
NanoClarity LLC

Dear Sir,

My congratulations for a truly excellent article that will help prove, without any doubts, that innovation belongs to the small. That is in sharp contrast with the new conventional wisdom that STEVE LOHR sold, a few days ago, to the readers of the New York Times, with his article Who Says Innovation Belongs to the Small? Mr. Lohr’s piece was a resounding success being in 5th place of all email articles as well as having hundreds of tweets in the past four days.

Mr. Lohr’s article aim is without any doubt to increase the huge barriers to the start-up companies you are suggesting in the power industry. To open the power industry to innovation, there is a need to perform a paradigm shift away from the investor owned utilities (IOUs) architecture framework (IOUs-AF) into the emergent electricity without price (EWPC) control architecture framework (EWPC-AF).

In one hand, the IOUs-AF, that keeps demand as an externality, has evolved from successive incremental extensions well beyond its useful life. The smart grid development is already heading very fast towards another incremental extension and time is very short to do otherwise. In that evolving architecture there was a big flaw at the outset that can be explained with a policy economics first, system performance second, leading to the deregulation fiasco and later to the Northeast blackout of 2003 to name two key events.

On the other hand, the EWPC-AF integrates demand to power system planning, operation and control, enabling elastics retails market and under a policy of systems performance first, economics second. EWPC is the first stage of the architecture. The second architecting stage will be the done by Second Generation Retailers (2GRs) under competition to try to develop business model innovations of 2GRs Service Enterprises.

I invite you to take a look at the EWPC Blog (link is below) which supports the above findings, with more than 160 articles and post. The EWPC is in fact an organizational basic innovation, which is well aligned to face the systemic climate change and energy crisis with a great cornucopia of opportunity.

If you think that I can be of service to the nanotechnology and/or VC industries, please advice.

José Antonio Vanderhorst-Silverio, PhD.
Systemic Consultant: Electricity.
EWPC’s System Architect
BS ´68, MS ´71 & PhD ´72, all from Cornell University.
Valued IEEE Member for 38 Years.
javs@ieee.org
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http://www.energyblogs.com/ewpc/
http://grupomillenium.blogspot.com/
Research and practice areas, and interests: Electricity Without Price Controls; Systems architecture; Systems thinking; Retail marketing; Customer orientation; Information systems requirements and design; Market rules; Contract assistance.