Alumni Who's News
Paul Thurk's Bright Idea
Paul Thurk, MBA ’00, is on a quest: he’s looking for the Thomas Edisons of the 21st century.
In 2001, Thurk read an article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society by two University of Texas at Austin chemistry professors, Brian Korgel and Keith P. Johnson. They had written about their discovery that silicon nanocrystals can emit light.
The concept intrigued Thurk right away. At the time, he was working as a Kauffman Fellow and as an associate at ARCH Venture Partners and he was hungry to explore interesting market areas. He’d set his sights on the solid-state lighting industry after learning that many conventional methods of lighting are highly inefficient. Research showed, for example, that for every 100 units of power consumed by a conventional light bulb, only 5 units of light are emitted. The other 95 units are wasted.
Silicon nanocrystals, on the other hand, might conceivably be used to generate a new type of lighting, one which would last substantially longer than today’s light bulbs. And with non-toxic silicon being the second most abundant element on earth’s crust, the raw material would not be prohibitively expensive.
Accordingly, Thurk set up a meeting with the professors, researched initial prototypes and sought advice from esteemed scientists and practitioners in the field. After a couple of months, he concluded that the project was viable.
Thurk founded InnovaLight in November 2001. As the start-up’s CEO, Thurk’s mission is to develop a process for harnessing the light-emitting power of silicon nanocrystals for use in a wide variety of everyday applications. InnovaLight is funded by five venture capital firms, as well as the Department of Defense, Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. Now, working with scientists in Germany, Canada and the United States, InnovaLight hopes to build on the professors’ initial findings to create an efficient light bulb with the capacity to last at least 30 years.
Of course, Innovalight isn’t the only company digging for gold in the solid-state lighting industry. General Electric, Osram-Sylvania, Philips Electric Company, Inc. and other smaller firms, such as Kopin and Evident, are vying against each other to be the first to smooth out the kinks in their formulas.
“There’s no doubt that this is a high-risk, high-reward project,” Thurk says. However, he is confident in ultimate success: “We have a completely different approach that should get around the technical and cost problems that plague other solutions.”
To that end, he’s been willing to sacrifice every minute of his free time to manage the InnovaLight team, recruit more high-quality scientists and researchers, raise money, work on collaborative business planning and secure intellectual property agreements.
In January 2003, Thurk uprooted the company from its original location in Austin. He moved headquarters to St. Paul, Minn., a beacon of nanotechnology resources, including the University of Minnesota’s world-renowned engineered nanoparticle and plasma aerosol groups. Ironically, Innovalight now resides in Menlo Park—a former crime lab turned technology incubator named after the famous Menlo Park laboratories of Thomas Edison.
Although the company has left town, Thurk says if InnovaLight is successful, the spotlight will shine on Austin. “It’s a University of Texas at Austin spinout, and I think if it works, it will be a pretty exciting win for the University.”
- Sandie Taylor
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