Ingenuity Lab (Alberta, Canada) and The New Economy

Alberta’s Ingenuity Lab has won an award from the UK-based magazine, The New Economy. More details about the magazine and the award follow but, first, from an Oct. 1, 2014 Ingenuity Lab news release,

Ingenuity Lab, Alberta’s first nanotechnology accelerator, has been named ‘Best Nanotechnology Research Organization 2014′ by The New Economy magazine, just under two years after its inception.

The award, which was presented to Ingenuity Lab Director, Carlo Montemagno, PhD last month at the London Stock Exchange studios, honours those who are breaking new ground across technology, energy, business and strategy landscapes.

Here’s a Sept. 15, 2014 video of Montemagno with The New Economy interviewer, Jenny Hammond,

The New Economy has provided a transcription of the video on its Using science to address global challenges: Ingenuity Lab on its progressive approach webpage which also hosts the video. (This particular question and answer interested me most,)

The New Economy: Well what problems do these areas [mining, agriculture, energy and health] pose, and what breakthroughs have you made in these areas?

Carlo Montemagno: We have been able to mimic the way nature works in the production of matter. We look around and we see the original nanotechnology machines of grass and green things. What we’ve figured out how to do is, how do you extract out the metabolism that’s found in those plants and those animals, and impart them inside materials that we engineer and produce. So it’s not alive, but it has the same metabolic pathways. So now we can take just CO2 that’s been emitted from a source, sunlight or another light source, and convert it directly into valuated dropping chemicals. We’ve identified 72 different chemicals that we can produce. That means that we can take an emission which is implicated in global warming and all those other problems, and now instead of emitting it, we use that to provide new products for that drive, and hopefully we’ll drive a new economic sector, and it will be deployable globally.

The New Economy has posted, as of today Oct. 2, 2014, a more substantive description of the work for which the Ingenuity Labs are being honoured, Ingenuity Lab: fighting blindness, influenza and water pollution. This article provides a bit a of a contrast to the video as it makes no mention of mining or emissions.

For anyone interested in the magazine, there’s this on their Contact page,

The New Economy is published quarterly and provided to Finance Directors, Chief Financial Officers and their legal and strategic advisers, corporate treasurers and leading bankers, institutional investors and compliance officers, regulators, Ministers of Finance, Energy/Environment Ministries and their senior council. The New Economy’s remit is to engender financial investment and encourage discussion and debate of appropriate strategies for the promotion of global economic growth in a concise and constructive format.

The approach is to create thought leaders in chosen content areas and invite them to knowledge share, providing a platform which allows their analysis and experience to be seen by enterprise Financial Strategists, whilst their presence identifies their organisations as Market Leaders.

On checking the editorial staff and contributors list on the Contact page I recognized a name,

Executive Editor:
Michael McCaw

Senior Assignment Editor:
Eleni Chalkidou

Contributors:
Donna Dickenson, Esther Dyson, Mohamed A El-Erian, Jules Gray, Rita Lobo, Bjorn Lomborg, David Orrell, Matthew Timms, Claire Vanner [emphasis mine]

Certainly that name gives The New Economy some added cachet (from her Wikipedia entry; Note: Links and footnotes have been removed),

Esther Dyson (born 14 July 1951) is a former journalist and Wall Street technology analyst who is a leading angel investor, philanthropist, and commentator focused on breakthrough efficacy in healthcare, government transparency, digital technology, biotechnology, and space. She recently founded HICCup, which just launched its Way to Wellville contest of five places, five years, five metrics. Hiccup.co blog . Dyson is currently focusing her career on production of health and continues to invest in health and technology startups.

Returning to where this post started, the entire Ingenuity Labs news release about its 2014 award can be found here.

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