Innovation in the trillion-dollar-per-year construction industry has been pretty sluggish over the past century. The low-tech method for producing standard gypsum drywall, for instance, was invented in 1917. It has plenty of drawbacks — including the release of some 20 billion pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere annually — but is still in use.
Enter Serious Materials, a Sunnyvale [Calif.) company that is applying knowhow from the computer hardware and software industries to reengineer the basic building blocks of construction. It’s no small feat, given that construction is responsible for 52 percent of CO2 emissions worldwide — more than transportation and all other industries combined. By giving a high-tech makeover to mundane construction materials such as drywall, Serious Materials thinks it could reduce world energy consumption as much as 75 percent by 2040.
Serious Technologies is one of 26 companies named on Dec. 3 as 2010 “technology pioneers” by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum. Every year since 2000, the WEF — with the help of a jury of experts, including this author — has chosen for the same honor anywhere from 25 to 50 companies that it judges to have a big potential impact on the world.
From 2000 to 2009, some 446 companies in all have been named tech pioneers. Some, such as Google and PayPal, have gone on to become household names. Some 80 of the pioneers have been acquired by other companies, such as BT, Microsoft, IBM, and Yahoo. Among the most recent acquisitions: In November, advertising platform company AdMob, a 2009 tech pioneer, was purchased by Google for $750 million, and Playfish, a social gaming company named as a 2010 pioneer, was acquired by Electronics Arts for $275 million in cash and $25 million in EA stock — even before its nomination as a tech pioneer became public.
This year’s…