Bayer’s Co. Wins Environmental

Prize in Oxford Competition

By Martha Slater

Ecovative Design LLC, a company founded by Eben Bayer, a 2003 graduate of South Royalton High School, and his business partner, Gavin McIntyre, was recently awarded £10,000 (approximately $20,500) as a winner of the 21^st Century Challenge Competition.

Hosted by Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, the international business plan competition challenged participants to "develop innovative, sustainable new business ventures that will help solve the major social and environmental challenges of the 21^st century."

Ecovative Design LLC was the brainchild of Bayer and McIntyre, both 2007 graduates of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Now located in the Rensselaer Incubator Center, the company won the competition’s "Tomorrow’s Planet" category for its development of environmentally friendly organic insulation.

Made from a patented combination of waste agricultural materials, water, and mushrooms, the organic insulation is called Greensulate.™ It is created by pouring a mixture of insulating particles and nutrients into a panel enclosure, and injecting it with mushroom cells that digest the nutrients and produce a tightly meshed network of insulating particles and mycelium.

The result is an organic composite board that has a competitive R-Value—a measurement of resistance to heat flow—and can serve as a firewall. Their product could replace the traditional foam insulations in homes, which require petroleum for production and are not biodegradable.

The competition received more than 180 entries from 23 countries. Participants were required to submit a five-page business plan focusing on one of three challenge categories that included: "Tomorrow’s Planet," focused on environmental challenges; "Tomorrow’s People," concentrated on healthcare and medical challenges; and "Tomorrow’s Wealth," centered on challenges of social inequality and the distribution of wealth. First-round judges scored each entry and reduced the field to nine finalists—three per category. 

The nine finalists presented their business plans to a panel of judges that included representatives from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the Financial Times, and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA). An overall competition winner received £35,000. Winners of each challenge category received £10,000.

Last year, the organic insulation was the winning entry in Rensselaer’s "Change the World Challenge" idea competition, which awards $1,000 for viable ideas that make the world a better place. Bayer was also a finalist in the Lemelson-Rensselaer Student Prize competition, the prestigious award given to a senior or graduate student who applies technology in a new way. 

Ecovative Design LLC also recently won first place at the Innovation Showcase competition sponsored by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in collaboration with the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) and Idea to Product (I2P) competitions.

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