The Idea Machine
Fortune Small Business reports that Saul Griffith gets up to 30 e-mails a day from qualified scientists eager to work for him. He can’t afford to hire them, so he wants to inspire them to be entrepreneurs instead.
Pithy articles about genius boys be damned,” says the 35-year-old Australian, thumping the table at a San Francisco coffeehouse. “There are more important things to cover a page with. I’ll give you one graphic with 600 new business models in it. Done.”
Griffith is talking about WattzOn.com, a Web site that calculates your precise impact on the environment — not just the energy it takes to heat your house or run your car, but the energy needed to manufacture all your possessions, as well as the energy the government hogs with your taxes. With all that data, WattzOn produces a detailed pie chart of your life. It’s a shocking sight, and it’s also where the new business models come in.
“Pick any one slice of that pie, figure out how to do that slice with 10 times less energy, and you have a billion-dollar company,” says Griffith, who launched WattzOn last year as a side project. “It’s that easy.” So much so, he says, that he’s using WattzOn to come up with ideas for his next 10 companies.
Photo by WattzOn.
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