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    Bright Ideas: Northwest Entrepreneurs & Their Inspiring Innovations
    Bright Ideas: Northwest Entrepreneurs & Their Inspiring Innovations
    Bright Ideas: Northwest Entrepreneurs & Their Inspiring Innovations
    Ebook88 pages1 hour

    Bright Ideas: Northwest Entrepreneurs & Their Inspiring Innovations

    By Seattle Business Magazine

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    About this ebook

    Indoor geo-location tracking. A new type of energy-efficient light bulb. A smart home-brewing machine that lets consumers make their own craft beer. Predictive analytics that fundamentally change the way businesses operate. These are among the many creative, evolutionary business ideas developed by entrepreneurs in the Pacific Northwest in myriad fields of endeavor, from medicine to geography to retail.

    In this collection of stories from Seattle Business magazine, we profile some of the region's best early-stage ideas across a wide range of fields. Not all will succeed, but all have the potential to create a big impact, because innovation makes our lives better and tends to have a ripple effect, creating jobs in unexpected places.

    Seattle draws strengths from the region’s deep knowledge in such areas as retail, aerospace, software, video games, medical device technology and global health. That diverse expertise has resulted in many global companies, including Boeing, Microsoft, Nordstrom, Starbucks, REI, Costco and, yes, Amazon. Each successful business has hired thousands of talented men and women who have, in turn, generated hundreds of other new ideas, many of which result in new companies like the ones profiled here.

    We hope these ideas will inspire your own innovations.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateMar 20, 2017
    ISBN9781483596587
    Bright Ideas: Northwest Entrepreneurs & Their Inspiring Innovations

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      Book preview

      Bright Ideas - Seattle Business Magazine

      Magazine

      Agriculture & Manufacturing

      A Better Apple Picker

      by Elizabeth Sandoval, March 2013

      Owners of fruit orchards have faced the same challenges for hundreds of years: how to pick fruit quickly and safely, protect it from bruising and get it to market expeditiously. Whooshh Innovations of Bellevue has developed a new harvesting and transport system called PickerTech that helps address many of those challenges.

      The PickerTech mobile harvest system allows workers to stand on platforms instead of ladders while picking fruit such as apples and pears. The picker drops the fruit into a tube attached to the platform. The tube contains a series of baffles that conform to the fruit, allowing for a patented, pneumatic process that creates a pressure differential to pull the fruit quickly and gently to its destination.

      A scanner identifies blemished fruit and puts it in a special bin for processing into apple juice and other processed products. The quality fruit goes into a separate bin that is either sent to refrigerated storehouses or to a packing plant to ready it for market. The cost of a new harvester can approach $200,000 or more, depending on components requested, but Vincent Bryan III, CEO of Whooshh Innovations, says the savings in picking, transportation, packaging and storage could result in a quick return on investment for any client.

      Whooshh Innovations, founded in 2007 as PickerTech, is starting with agriculture, but could find its largest markets in industrial applications. The company already has a joint-venture partner in Norway, as well as with government agencies in the United States, looking at applications for the salmon aquaculture industry. Whooshh’s tubes may be used to transport live salmon from the ponds to processing plants. The tubes may also replace conveyor belts and carts to transport salmon from one end of a processing plant to the other.

      Growing Concern

      by Patrick Marshall, March 2015

      Farmers who can raise crop yields while responding to issues like climate change and water scarcity have a significant advantage. Toward that end, a Pullman firm launched in 2012 by scientists at Washington State University sells hardy plantlets it grows in a lab using secret sauces of nutrients.

      Think of [plants in] a jar with Jell-O, with all the vitamins and nutrients they need, says Phytelligence cofounder Tyson Koepke.

      The plants are clones, just like nursery-bred plants. We take one plant and we grow it for a month and we can cut it into three plants, explains Koepke. And each of those plants will become another three after another month. So we’re able to get a threefold increase every month.

      The plantlets are transferred to a greenhouse, where they are grown to 18 inches and sold to nurseries. Farmers looking to plant 10 acres of apples trees might normally have to wait five years for the trees. We can shorten that time down to about two years, says Koepke. Last year, we produced and delivered 110,000 plants. By the spring of 2016, he says the company will have 500,000 plants available for farmers to buy.

      Phytelligence’s proprietary process, developed by WSU plant scientist Amit Dhingra and his research team, requires less than a gallon of water to grow an apple plantlet to the point at which it is ready for planting. (The conventional approach requires 50 gallons.) The resulting smart plants also have far higher survival rates after planting.

      Each type of plant requires its own recipe of nutrients. Some of the varieties and species we have worked with don’t necessarily apply directly right now to other areas of the country, Koepke notes. But as we expand our technology and offerings, we expect to be able to help growers all around the country, and even around the world.

      So far, Phytelligence has sold its plants largely to in-state farmers and nurseries. In fact, two-thirds of the company’s initial round of financing came from these potential customers.

      Water, Water Everywhere

      by Bill Virgin, April 2013

      The sprint from idea to revenue-generating company might be standard operating procedure in the tech realm, but even a mobile-app developer or social-networking site might have trouble keeping up with Alexandra Abraham and her startup, DripCatch Inc.

      It began with the idea for DripCatch—a tray to collect water that drains from racks of glasses. Without her invention, water would otherwise wind up on the floors of restaurants and catering kitchens, creating safety and cleanliness problems.

      In a couple of years, Abraham got a patent on the design, arranged for tooling from China, set up the company and raised some capital with the help of family members, found a local contract manufacturer—Woodinville’s Cashmere Molding—to produce the trays for less than she could source them from China, talked her way into a meeting with restaurateur Tom Douglas, who not only endorsed the product but also joined the board and encouraged a local commercial kitchen supply company to carry the item, signed a national distribution agreement with another and recruited local hotels and restaurants to test the product (with many of them buying).

      Pretty impressive for a company in the staid business of manufacturing—and for a 23-year old who would have finished her degree in business at Seattle University if she hadn’t actually gone out and started a company instead.

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