Enviropreneurship: Bridging the Gap between Innovation and Function

Environmental Entrepreneurship: Bridging Gap between Innovation and Function

Abstract:

Environmental challenges of the current century are systemic threats to the fabric of our civilization. In this context, environmental entrepreneurship has emerged as a key mitigation concept that combines economic and environmental dimensions by leveraging state-of-the-art technology innovations. Seeing entrepreneurship through the lens of engineering innovation is crucial to produce actionable theory for sustainable technology. But what are the environmental entrepreneurship elements, challenges, and success factors? How can researchers, technology innovators, and entrepreneurs connect to this emerging field?

This seminar introduces environmental entrepreneurship as the process of discovering, evaluating, and exploiting market forces that allow to have effective and fast business cases in environmentally-relevant markets. The seminar will also discuss views on bridging academic innovation and technology productization to deliver pragmatic solutions to environmental challenges of the planet.

Speaker Biography

Dr. Mostafa Farrokhabadi is the Senior Director of Technology at BluWave-ai, an internationally award-winning startup offering data-driven control and optimization solutions for smart grids. He has 10 years of experience in designing mission-critical grid solutions for industry and academia, including technical leadership of a $6M international consortium in Electric Grid Modernization, and Smart Grid projects with Hatch and Canadian Solar. Mostafa has authored/co-authored several high-impact technical papers and patents on intelligent control and optimization of renewable-penetrated grids. Mostafa obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo. He has also studied and performed research in Sweden at KTH and Germany at KIT. Mostafa has received multiple business, research, and teaching awards, including the prestigious University of Waterloo Doctoral Thesis Completion Award and Ottawa’s Forty Under 40. Currently, he serves as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid and IEEE DataPort, and Secretary of IEEE Ottawa Section.