Tom Quinn isn’t the kind of entrepreneur who needs help getting his ideas in front of the right people. He’s a former president of networking software maker Novell, and he invented the motion-controller technology behind Nintendo’s Wii while running a company called Gyration, where he raised $40 million in venture capital. So why is he pitching his latest idea — a portable system to convert food scraps and other waste into ethanol — on a Web site frequented by basement tinkerers and dorm-room startups?
Quinn’s E-Fuel is among more than 1,000 companies, inventors, and students vying for funding in a General Electric contest called the ecomagination Challenge. A half-dozen winners will get cash prizes of up to $100,000. More significantly, GE and four venture capital firms plan to invest $200 million in the best clean-technology ideas entered in the contest.
A partnership with GE could give a big boost to E-Fuel, which now has 25 employees and has sold 50 of its biofuel systems. (They retail for $10,000, though a 50 percent federal tax credit can cut the cost in half.) Quinn says GE could manufacture the machines at lower cost and deploy its army of salespeople to get E-Fuel’s products to customers worldwide. “I think we’d be a multibillion-dollar company,” Quinn says. “And I’m a guy that’s created multibillion-dollar companies.”
GE’s contest is one of at least a dozen similar programs sponsored by corporations casting a wider net for new business ideas, in the process creating opportunities for entrepreneurs. Such contests have “just exploded,” says Jay Rao, a professor of innovation at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass. Cisco Systems, Netflix, and PepsiCo have launched competitions to incorporate outside ideas into their businesses, offering winners cash prizes or partnership opportunities. Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, Dell, and others have pages on their Web sites…