FUTURE TECHONOMISTS
The only difference between these people and the ones on the previous list is their relative youth. These are people mostly under 35 who have already changed our world, and from whom we can expect to see more transformative ideas. We single them out because the best ideas often come from people who don’t have a vested interest in the status quo, and see no reason not to try to invent better ways of doing things themselves. That is the techonomic spirit, pure and simple.
Robin Li (b. 1968)
Not many Internet search engines can claim to have taken on Google and won. In China, however, Robin Li, co-founder of Baidu, has kept one step ahead of Google almost since it was founded in 2000. This is important because China potentially represents the biggest single market for Internet services- one as big as North America and Europe combined.
Li was born in China, but learned the ropes of Internet technology and entrepreneurship in the U.S. He made a name for himself as a search engine whiz in the late 1990s when he designed one of the first photo image search algorithms. But he always knew the big opportunities would be in bringing the Internet to China. His techonomic insight was to marry his technological expertise to a deep understanding of the intricacies and idiosyncracies of the fast-evolving business and cultural environment in his homeland.
Mark Zuckerberg (b. 1984)
When Zuckerberg sat down in early 2004 to create what would become Facebook, he didn’t intend to build a world-altering communications medium. He just had an idea for how Harvard–the school he attended–ought to use the Internet for student information. He not only timed his innovation perfectly, but also adapted it brilliantly over time as the Internet environment shifted. Today Facebook is used by about 400 million people and in almost every country. For many users it has replaced email as the primary way they keep in touch with friends and acquaintances.
Want to see a techonomic multiplier in action? That’s Facebook. Zuckerberg’s service may be the fastest-growing brand and business in world history. It is now not only altering interpersonal communication, but politics, government, marketing, and media in country after country. But it was Zuckerberg’s rock-solid conviction about the centrality of the Internet that has led him to become perhaps his generation’s greatest Techonomist. Long before he created Facetook, the idea that technology would transform communications was for him an article of faith.
Elisabet de los Pinos (b. 1974)
Blending business sense with a combination different scientific disiplines into a single innovation is the key to De los Pinos’ ingenious approach to delivering cancer-killing drugs to the targeted tissue. Aura Bioscience’s Nanosmart method wraps chemotherapy drugs in tiny hollow organic particles that break down only when they reach their destination, say a cancerous tumor in the liver. The particles also can convey fluorescent markers detectable by magnetic resonance imaging machines to track the therapy’s effectiveness.
De los Pinos, a native of Barcelona, and her younger brother Jordi and a fellow classmate at MIT named Zeid Barakat, founded Aura in order to license the Nanosmart technology from a German company that developed the particles, and then found an application for it. Aura, then, isn’t really a pharmaceutical company, but one that employs advances in nanotechnology to devise new ways to make already approved drugs more effective, while avoiding the collateral damage they can cause to tissues that have no need for the therapy. The techonomic benefit is to multiply the potential uses of proven drug therapies that heretofore couldn’t be prescribed safely.
Achim Kopmeier (b. 1969)
Although two thirds of the earth is covered with oceans, water isn’t everywhere. And clean, usable water is even scarcer. Moreover, steady supplies of usable water usually require a huge infrastructure to deliver it, and another huge infrastructure to deal with the waste people put in the water they’re done using it. Kopmeier, a water-treatment engineer from Luxembourg, decided there had to be a better, cheaper way to extract good water from the waste, and one that didn’t require all that infrastructure. After tinkering around in his workshop, he came up with something he calls ExSep – the Extreme Separator, that made it cost efficient for factories to clean and reuse water from industrial processes. That led him to devise self-contained, portable versions of the ExSep for use at disaster sites or remote locations. The full techonomic benefits of Kopmeier’s technology haven’t been imagined yet. But in an increasingly crowded world placing more and more demands on finite supplies of fresh water, he’s in a seller’s market for the most vital commodity of them all.
K.R. Sridhar
Imagine unlocking the potential energy of hydrocarbons without burning them. Could you unlock the same pent-up electrons without releasing poisons and messy waste in the process? That’s the question former NASA scientist Sridhar asked, while tinkering in his garage with a different kind of fuel cell. That technology is usually associated with extracting hydrogen from water, or with powering spacecraft, but Sridhar’s method, called “solid oxide regeneration” is basically containing and controlling electrochemical reactions using ethanol, natural gas, biodiesel, or methane. His company, Bloom Energy, hopes to build a refrigerator-sized unit that can light up a remote village far from the grid. Bloom has already sold some units to the headquarters of eBay that will produce enough energy to power 250 homes.
Sridhar’s techonomic breakthrough will really shine as the cost comes down. It’s also an example of finding a way to repurpose renewable hydrocarbons that can be derived from plant life, rather than dug out of the ground.