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Mark Lawson-Statham, Chief Operating Officer,
Intelligent Energy, United Kingdom
1. What is it about your company that makes it so special?
Our people - their tremendous creativity and drive have allowed us to set about deliberately challenging conventional thinking in the areas of fuel cell technology and hydrogen generation.
2. What country best facilitates starting a technology company? What single thing can a government do to encourage Technology Pioneers?
This is a difficult question as we only have experience of starting businesses in two territories: the UK and the US.
Fundamentally, intelligence is our raw material, meaning that access to a well-educated labour force is our first critical requirement. Whilst we have deliberately structured our business model to avoid the need for large amounts of financial capital, bridging the chasm from innovation to revenue generation is undoubtedly facilitated by access to mature capital markets. Having said that, capital is also very mobile in today’s world and in some respects the integrity of a local exchange is more important than the depth of the local capital market.
Finally, government support is vital, both in terms of the ability of governments to offer direct sponsorship of fundamental research and also in their ability to set a coherent agenda that leads from vision to implementation. We have received good support from governmental agencies to date in both the UK and the US. However, as far as fuel cells are concerned, Japan has arguably the most joined-up policy on actual implementation.
Too often the green shoots of enterprise, funded by government R&D support, wither and die when exposed to harsh commercial realities. Technological developments, especially when they have the potential to effect a paradigm shift, need longer lead times. This is where governments should be bolder in picking potential winners and assisting in the commercialisation process through the development of target markets. Unfortunately, this is often the point in the cycle where research grants and R&D tax credits dry up.
3. What makes an innovator?
Intelligent Energy has been fortunate in some respects, in that our technology was developed without necessitating recourse to the more mature fuel cell technologies available in the USA. We started with a blank piece of paper and with few preconceptions of what a fuel cell should look like. As a result, we have developed a technology that is, in many respects, structurally different from the incumbent technologies. We are still seeing tremendous advances from our core architecture and are not yet limited by incremental thinking. However, we are certainly not naïve enough to believe that our design is the ‘holy grail’. I only hope that at the time when we begin to see the limits of our technology, we will have the courage and the vision to start again with a new blank piece of paper.
4. How does your company directly contribute to improving the state of the world?
Fuel cell technology has the capacity to effect a paradigm shift in the way we use energy. Hydrogen fuel cells produce heat and electricity with no carbon footprint. This has tremendous implications for our ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Hydrogen is not yet widely distributed and the availability of mass-market hydrogen will rely upon policy decisions and reasonably large capital commitments. There will come a day when this will happen, but we cannot simply sit and wait. We believe that the efficient conversion of hydrocarbons to hydrogen (through a process called reforming) will create a bridge to the hydrogen economy. That is why Intelligent Energy is also building technologies can do this and that can work with whatever hydrocarbon is locally available (from natural gas, through gasoline, to heavy diesel).
In addition, the ability of fuel cells to provide power at the point of consumption, in a modular way, without recourse to a power grid, means that power can be taken to those in regions where the cost of electricity through traditional grid based distribution would be uneconomic. This means that power can be provided to the rural poor in large regions of the globe where the provision of productive power is the key to economic growth.
5. What do you hope to gain from being a Technology Pioneer?
We cannot change the world on our own. We need policy support from governments and real practical engagement from global corporations and bodies. Together, as partners, we need to have the collective courage and belief that things
can
get done and fundamental changes
can
occur. We hope that the WEF will provide a crucible within which these partnerships can be formed.
6. What do you think the role of technology should be in society?
Technology is above all an enabler. In itself it cannot solve all of man’s problems, but it can give us the tools and the information to allow us to make progressive and intelligent choices.
7. What is the right balance in society between scientific interest and ethical concerns?
That’s a big question and one that perhaps can’t be answered in full here. I would simply say that each long journey starts with a small (and sometimes imperfect) step. For Intelligent Energy, the combined vision of our technology helping to bring real global environmental benefit, whilst also helping to alleviate rural poverty is certainly enough to get us out of bed and into work in the mornings! Given the nature of our work, scientific interest and ethical concerns are indivisible as the company’s core activities are inherently progressive.
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