“Our plan is a battery that essentially
lasts forever,” said MBA candidate Jon Hofmeister, who was on the winning team
for the Quest for Adventure MBA business plan competition.
Hofmeister and fellow second-year MBA students Jed Cahill and Mason Adair had been working on the competition since the summer.
“We worked well together in first-year things but I think we also have real complementary skills,” said Hofmeister.
The three formed a team named Perpetua to market a patent-pending technology developed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) — the Thermoelectric Ambient Energy Harvester — a technology capable of supplying electricity essentially forever.
“What the technology does is use very small differences in temperature to generate electricity,” said Cahill.
“The reason it lasts forever is it takes something that’s natural and turns it into energy,” said Hofmeister.
Cahill had initial exposure to the technology through the Technology Entrepreneurship Fellows Program in which PNNL exposes students to technology that has yet to be marketed.
“What we’ve done is taken that technology and came up with some ways that it could actually be put into a product,” said Hofmeister.
Perpetua team members interviewed businesspeople in various markets in order to determine a suitable market for the technology.
“We looked into the feasibility of designing and manufacturing a technology based on this technology,” said Cahill.
They found their answer in the burgeoning wireless sensor market. Wireless sensors are used in a variety of civil engineering projects such as monitoring the safety of bridges and roads.
The wireless sensor market will ship about 10 million units in 2005 and is expected to grow to 1 billion units by 2010, according to Cahill.
“Each of these requires a power source like a battery or our
product,” he said.
Perpetua envisions using the
energy harvester in “places where it’s pretty difficult to get a person out there to change a little battery,” such as underground or in remote locations, said Hofmeister.
Also, using an energy harvester instead of a traditional battery would cut down on labor costs for replacing batteries in thousands of remote locations, Cahill said.
Six teams competed in the competition on Dec. 3, which was sponsored by the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship.
In addition to submitting a written business plan, teams had to deliver a 15-minute presentation and participate in a rigorous 20-minute question and answer session with the six judges, who are financial professionals from throughout Oregon.
Then, the judges gave about a half hour of feedback.
“That’s super helpful for us because we’re going to be going to about 3 or 5 other competitions,” Hofmeister said.
The winning team will represent the University in several national and international business plan competitions — the first is in Ohio during February.
In order to compete in other competitions, the team must also develop an “elevator pitch,” which is a pitch for the business plan in a minute or less, as if to simulate a brief encounter in the professional world.
The team received a $1,500 cash prize for their December victory.

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