– saving 300 million people from daily arsenic poisoning in their drinking water. (ie. Bangladesh)

The application for the Science Commons mode is intended to empower people in developing countries to create microenterprises around indigenous manufacturing of arsenic removal devices for drinking water.

We are right in the midst of launching this venture, already competed in the MIT Enterprise Forum with our enterprise plan, and will be presenting at the EPA People, Prosperity, and the Planet program at the National Academies in Washington D.C. in May.

Reviewers in the Enterprise Forum of course immediately ruled out such a philanthropic venture as being of any interest to a Venture Capitalist. There are also difficult challenges in releasing intellectual property associated with this work because of constraints of the University system imposed by the State Board of Ethics – ie. our UMASS Intellectual Property people say that we are not allowed to release it for use by other people without recompense, because that would be cheating the state’s citizen’s out of their cut on work developed in a state-sponsored insitution. On the other hand, nor are they interested in paying for the patent we disclosed a few years ago. So there is quite a dynamic story evolving. Inherent conflicts in basic principles.

Our initiative is fast become a network of contributors – already spanning UMASS-Lowell Center for Green Chemistry, UMASS-Boston Environment, Ocean, and Coastal Sciences, the UMASS Environmental Business Technology Center, the Babson College MBA Entrepreneurs Track, Wentworth Institute Civil and Environmental Engineering program, volunteer mentors from a several companies, and an NGO. We will likely add four more university groups within four weeks. And then I will be on the road to schools throughout the area enlisting collaboration, and making pitches to foundations to enlist support.

There are several thrusts that we believe must accompany this mode of Technology Transfer.

First is the development of a collaborative community. Towards that end we have engaged face-to-face collaborations in order to lay the foundation. Now we are launching an internet collaborative space on the Sustainability Knowledge Network in order to support the rapid expansion of this collaboration.

Second, is design for Lead-User Innovation. The overall operation of the device must be transparent to the user – for example an entrepreneur in Bangladesh.

The end-user – must be able to work with the components in a modular fashion, able to substitute a variety of local materials. That is typically done by having a simple, well defined interface. This permits local customization.

We have already integrated this initiative with K-12 outreach. Just this week we hosted a group of high school students from the GEAR-UP Lowell program to engage them in this project. We are hoping to work with them to produce a traveling museum display – and we have a standing invitation from the Museum of Science – Boston to deploy it. (We just hosted 300 high school students for “Green Chemistry Day” at the Museum.) I would really like to engage these kids, who are in challenging circumstances themselves but really trying to make it. I believe that also engaging them as part of the production of a radio show would be really building of their self-esteem.

An interesting note is that our work on this technology and the enterprise design and the building of the collaboration network, has all happened without a cent of support. We are all volunteers.

We could use our collaboration space on the Sustainability Knowledge Network to cultivate and refine content and “co-produce” a show, (or whatever lingo you find helpful for describing the envisioned operation of this new format) that is intertwined with a community television piece, that could be redeployed in video chunks back on the internet, as well as the dialogue on our internet portal.

Sounds exciting! Are you proposing a sort of radio-blog database, where users send in their own radio ‘programs’? Or are you extending what you did with Lydon Interviews, but in a new format? Or something completely different?

Either way, I’ll be watching with open eyes (and ears!).