In Frayne’s line of work, patience is more than a virtue. While startups race their products to market, impatient for revenue, market share, returns, and exits, inventions can take serious time. Look, for example, at Frayne’s biggest moneymaker to date: reusable, inflatable packaging that he first dreamed up back in 2005. Frayne quickly assigned his invention to packaging giant Sealed Air Company, but the first commercial product, Wonderfil Wrap Inflatable Packaging, didn’t launch until late December 2012—a month after our meeting at the train station.

Waiting an extra 20 minutes for me? No big deal.

Frayne took me to the squat, industrial office tower where his company, Haddock Invention, is based. The building’s dominant design aesthetic, as in many Chinese buildings, is concrete and dust. Inside, though, a wall of windows cast sunlight onto an array of desks, workshop counters, power tools, prototypes, storage bins, and couches. Small art pieces and potted plants were scattered around the room, and the lab was in a pleasant state of disarray, as the team was doing a test-build of a Solar Pocket Factory prototype.

Among the innovations that have come out of this room, the biggest might not be a product, but an idea: that in the future, innovation won’t happen under the big tents of deep-pocketed companies. Instead, it will happen through the collaboration of small, independent labs like this one.

That’s why Frayne and his partners have started the Ocean Invention Network—a superlab of like-minded inventors with a common aim — to reduce carbon emissions worldwide, dramatically and affordably.

Creativity within constraints

In his senior year at MIT, Frayne took a class on creating appropriate technologies for developing countries. The class eventually formed the basis for MIT’s innovative D-Lab program; it also helped shape Frayne’s thinking about how invention happens.

In the class (and later as an intern in Haiti) Frayne worked on ways to make fuel from agricultural waste a viable alternative to charcoal. To do so, they wanted to let local farmers make the ag-waste briquettes in the off-season. That meant dropping the size and price of the equipment used to make the briquettes from $20,000 to $50.

Hitting those price points wasn’t possible by simply improving the existing designs, so the team looked for — and found — alternative ways to approach briquette making. Instead of limiting the team’s success, designing with “more severe cost and user-experience constraints” inspired creativity and helped the team move from innovating within an existing technology framework to inventing an entirely new one. That was the “aha” moment for Frayne.

A crash course in the history of invention

What worked, Frayne realized, was the different skills and experience the project’s partners brought to the table. “I got really into the idea of designing and inventing new products with teams in developing countries, combined with teams in wealthy countries,” he says. “I saw the advantages of how that could lead to new ideas faster than if these were generated in just one place.”

Over the last 200 years, inventing has been characterized by a soup-to-nuts approach that encompassed everything from R&D to product sales, Frayne explains. That process required companies to aggregate large numbers of talent in one place, on one payroll. “It’s what was done at Edison’s labs, and Bell Labs. It’s what Tesla did,” he says.

If you want to work on radical innovations that can have a real impact, he says, “your only option has been to go into a big company like GE, work your way up, become the CTO, and have influence that way,” he says. But big company execs don’t have the same agility as the independent inventor to pursue new ideas and pivot quickly.

Today, Frayne believes that real innovation, real invention, requires a new approach. “The problems of the world are so globalized, and the information and talents needed to solve those problems are so spread out, that it’s a fool’s errand to try and pull all that talent to one place,” he says.

A cleantech supergroup

Particularly in a field like cleantech, disruptive innovations require expertise in a huge number of areas. Look at the solar industry, and you’ll see what he means: chemistry, electrical engineering, biology, hardware manufacturing, software development, mechanical engineering, and supply chain management all play critical roles in the sector.

With that kind of diversity, Frayne says a new approach to innovation needs to emerge — one that embraces distributed work styles and novel collaboration. That’s the idea behind the Ocean Invention Network, which Frayne helped launch last year. He likens the model to indie bands that have different styles and strengths, but often collaborate on joint performances or side projects.

To extend the metaphor, the Ocean Invention Network is an indie rock supergroup of the cleantech scene; Haddock Invention, which opened shop in 2006, is on lead guitar, while Mantis Shrimp Invention, opened in Manila (Philippines) by Alex Hornstein in 2012, hits the drums. (The Solar Pocket Factory, in this scenario, is their hit single.)

Being part of the network, Frayne imagines, will let small labs benefit from the breadth and diversity of a big company R&D team while remaining as nimble as an “ongoing perpetual startup.”

How it works

While most startup founders in Silicon Valley drop everything to focus on one idea for a period of less than 10 years, inventor labs are expected to keep several balls in the air at all times. In the Bay Area, a few groups are attempting this type of inventor’s approach, including Saul Griffith’s Other Lab (Griffith is also a product of MIT). But none have taken such a global approach.

Here’s how the Ocean Invention approach works: Each independent “node” (lab) — comprising 5-10 staff — works on 3-4 projects in parallel. Projects are a mix of experimental inventions, consulting and product development. When an idea gets enough momentum, partner labs can get involved to help vet, improve, and grow the idea.

Frayne thinks the model can help both amplify good ideas and quickly discard bad ones. “Our lab is better because we work with Alex’s lab,” he says.

Better yet, because the labs can stay focused on their area of expertise, the knowledge gained from the development process is retained within the company, even when an invention matures and gets spun out into its own company. (Haddock, for example, has spun out three companies to date: Humdinger Wind Energy, B-Squares Electrics, and Coho Solar Inc.)

“You can continue to recycle those resource,” Frayne says. “Once a specific product gets to market, it doesn’t end. You’re trying to build something much bigger.”

The future of inventing?

So far, the labs in Hong Kong and Manila are the only two Ocean Invention partners labs, though the team has relationships with labs in Guatemala, New York, San Francisco, and elsewhere. Frayne is aiming to bring on another full partner lab by 2014, probably also in Southeast Asia. “We are actually finding that travel between labs is important,” he says. “Even in the age of Skype and FedEx, we need to have face-to-face time in the beginning stages.”

Haddock Invention and Manila Mantis Shrimp engineers use Skype to help address issues with a Solar Pocket Factory prototype. Photo courtesy: Ocean Invention Network

Frayne estimates that labs burn between $100,000 and $400,000 each year, and that it will take about two years before they can support themselves on income through licensing of technologies they develop. That’s how Haddock and Mantis Shrimp both got started. Whether that’s a reliable strategy for bringing other labs online is another question that’s still to be answered. Down the road, the Network might be able to provide financial support for new labs during their infancy.

Frayne says he hopes the success of collaborative projects, like the Solar Pocket Factory, will draw interest from inventors around the world. “We’re working on it,” he said

If a superlab of inventors, driven by a common vision for how big ideas can come out of small teams, proves successful, expect to see more like it in sectors well beyond cleantech. One thing’s for certain: new models for creating innovation to solve the world’s most pressing problems are sorely needed.

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For now, the amount of natural gas trucks for commercial fleets will outpace sales of natural gas cars to consumers in most markets, as there just aren’t many natural gas consumer cars available, the infrastructure for fueling such cars isn’t widespread, and consumers haven’t shown all that much interest in these cars yet. A few countries in the world, however, do have significant amounts of natural gas cars on the roads already, particularly for taxi use, including Argentina, Brazil, Iran, and Egypt, says Pike Research. In addition, Pakistan will have 2.7 million natural gas vehicles on the roads by the end of 2012.

In the U.S., though, a renewed push from companies and the government could lead to more innovation to deliver natural gas cars to consumers. Last week, the Department of Energy’s high-risk, early stage program — ARPA-E — announced a new project that will give $30 million in grants to companies, university labs and startups building the next-generation of natural gas vehicle technology. Grant winners included GE, Ford, Eaton, SRI, Other Lab, Texas A&M, Pacific Northwest National Labs, and the Center for Electromechanics at the University of Texas at Austin.

GE is using the grant to build a natural gas refueling station for homes that will be cheaper and can refuel more quickly than what’s currently available. Other Lab is using the grant to work on a high-pressure natural gas tank that uses small diameter tubes tightly wound into a tank shape, like intestines.

As GigaOM Pro cleantech analyst Adam Lesser wrote earlier this year, all this innovation is all being spurred by super low cost, and abundant natural gas in the U.S. Natural gas dipped below $2 per thousand cubic feet in April, the first time in a decade, driven by the expansion in hydraulic fracking, a mild winter and the fact that the U.S. market is largely closed to outside demand because we cannot yet export natural gas at scale. That makes today’s natural gas prices of around $2.40, the same as about $14 per barrel of oil, or $1.50 less per gallon when compared to gasoline. And natural gas emits fewer emissions when burned compared to oil.

Image courtesy of GE, Gerry Dincher.

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Using an impressive series of charts and graphs, Griffith explained how quality data visualizations help put energy policy into context. For example, his personal energy usages was 18,000 watts a year in 2007, with about 45 percent of that wattage generated by his airline flights — he takes about 40 a year. Compare that to the 3 percent he consumes on lighting, and one can see that replacing a few lightbulbs in his home, as opposed to eliminating one or two plane rides, has a relatively small impact. He also realized, after putting his usage in context with the rest of the nation, that he uses far more than the average American.

The average American uses 11,000 watts, which means that as a person who commutes to work on a bike, and tries to act responsibly with regard to energy consumption, he’s still “no better than a Texan,” which makes him “a planet-f***ing hypocrite.” The moral here is that with better visualizations and software created to render those visualizations, perhaps citizens can figure out both how to make the biggest impact and where they stand with regard to the rest of the world. And maybe it could take the self-righteous down a notch or two.

That’s the personal level, but at the policy level, Griffith also illustrated how much energy we consume and showed imagery to track how much renewable energy we’d need in terms of solar arrays or tidal power to generate the energy we use today. For example, solar power generates about 1 to 2 watts per square meter of land. So when governments are planning out their energy goals for the next few decades they must take into account if they have the room to replace their coal with solar, for example. They must also look ahead and predict real energy demand, as opposed to the demands of today.

With humanity requiring 18 terawatts of power per year to live the way we do now, Griffith’s points are important to creating a populace and a political class that can have honest discussions about energy consumption, distribution and use. His plea is for those with experience in this to help the government and him make these software programs a reality.

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