Accelerating Innovation through American-Made Challenges
American entrepreneurs provide dynamic solutions to real-world energy challenges, while they often face challenges of their own to bring products to market. During the early phases of product development, entrepreneurs are faced with ensuing stages of protecting intellectual property, testing and validation, manufacturing at scale, and building the distribution networks essential to a sound business model.
The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy designed the American-Made Challenges to inspire these innovators, encouraging them to push forward with ideas that address important energy and resource issues. Challenge winners are awarded cash prizes to tackle barriers to manufacturing at scale, and offered a connection to the American-Made Network which allows energy entrepreneurs to tap into interdisciplinary resources for problem-solving support to develop and commercialize their ideas and products.
When it launched in January 2018, the American-Made Challenges program encompassed six competitions, focusing on marine power desalination and solar desalinization, lithium-battery recycling, energy savings at U.S. manufacturing plants, ocean-observing technologies, and pumped-storage hydropower.
Since the launch, ten additional competitions have been introduced, addressing solar energy innovations (with four rounds of prizes), water resource recovery, geothermal manufacturing, advanced manufacturing of hydropower systems, fish protection, geotechnical hydropower foundations, and bolstering regional innovation clusters.
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