May 12 2014

Emerging Leaders Series: Craig Beckman of Miox

What does Miox do?
MIOX was founded around the idea that smart onsite solutions would drive the future of water. On-site generation has a fundamentally disruptive value proposition—producing chemicals on site rather than shipping expensive, often dangerous chemicals to a site. Today, we sell our solutions based on cost savings, but we are also seeing widespread adoption based on sustainability and safety. As chemical prices have risen dramatically in the $50 billion chemical business, MIOX sales have been gaining momentum. We provide an environmentally sustainable solution for the long term that saves money right away.

MIOX goes after big problems. We all work very hard at MIOX to engineer solutions that meet very real, very pressing and critical water challenges. MIOX’s engineers and executives could make more money working elsewhere, but they’re here because of the problems we get to tackle and the challenges of bringing in game-changing solutions. Project by project, we are driving a new generation of water management– giving people access to low-cost clean water, reducing the risks in fracing, providing clean water to US special forces and supporting humanitarian efforts to eliminate legionella in hospitals.

Can you describe a project that has defined the company and its culture?
The performance of our teams in installing new sites is astounding. I think this comes back to the company culture where the team wants to see the company succeed. We’ve pulled off some amazing deliveries in the last couple of years; deliveries that wouldn’t have happened if the team didn’t come together the way they did. In 2013 the team was tasked with taking a new product from concept to production to operation at the customer site in just 6 months. Now there are multiple MIOX Blackwater mobile water treatment systems treating produced water in two of the largest shale plays in the United States.

Which projects are showing the market potential for your product? What are the bottom-line benefits that you are seeing?
We’re seeing a huge pull from cooling towers to replace organic biocides delivered to their site. Replacement of gas chlorine to meet Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) standards is a constant area of growth in the US and internationally. In addition to removing the safety hazards of chemicals like gas chlorine, policy makers worldwide are also looking for an alternative to organic biocides that cause long-term environmental damage like glutaraldehyde or quaternary amines. What’s closing the deal for most of these industrial projects is that customers are seeing return on investment (ROI) in 11-18 months. It’s a win-win for the environment and for the bottom-line.

What brought you to join Miox?
As Director of Global Industrial Sales of GE Water, I got a view of the day-to-day problems that our clients face and I saw technologies that would solve these problems on a predictable basis. It was frustrating to see great solutions fall by the wayside because of corporate bureaucracy and red tape.

When I interviewed at MIOX, I saw a company had already taken a series of new solutions to market to solve very real and challenging issues in the water industry. Joining a small, tight knit team of really smart folks would allow me to bring innovative solutions from concept to market and then to mass market adoption.

What experiences have driven your career?
Early on in my career, I realized the value of understanding the customer problem and the value of a solution. Helping people buy things was really about putting myself in their shoes – understanding the problems they face – and coming up with a solution to meet their needs. If you want to sell, you need to see things from the client’s perspective. How do they view the risk?

Working with automotive companies in Detroit during the early 1990s taught me how to understand the value of a solution from the customer’s perspective, and how to sell around that.

In pitching my products to a manufacturer for a plant in Mexico, I started by asking questions about the problems that this customer was facing. The client asked if I wanted to visit the factory. I was the only supplier that was ready to travel to Mexico to see this operation. That visit closed the deal for me. Once I was down there at the plant in Mexico, I realized how important reliable performance was for this remote site.

Where do you see the impact of MIOX’s solutions?
I love traveling around the world and seeing how people get water— drinking water, water for farming, or industrial water at a factory. During a recent trip to Nairobi, I visited an NGO project run by Shining Hope for Communities in the Kibera slums (http://shininghopeforcommunities.org/). Shining Hope builds kiosks that sell safe drinking water to residents, schools, and medical clinics. The kiosks use the money from water sales to build and maintain the kiosks. The day that I visited, I saw a line of 200 jerrycans of water waiting for the kiosk to open for the day. These kiosks are solving an important problem that is easy to solve with the right technology and a strong organization in the field.

We’ve pulled off some amazing deliveries in the last couple of years; deliveries that wouldn’t have happened if the team didn’t come together the way they did. In 2013 the team was tasked with taking a new product from concept to production to operation at the customer site in just 6 months. Now there are multiple MIOX Blackwater mobile water treatment systems treating produced water in two of the largest shale plays in the United States.

Craig Beckman is the President & CEO for MIOX Corporation, an electrolytic technology leader for customized disinfection chemistries. Prior to MIOX, Craig was the Vice President Equipment Sales at GE Water with responsibility of a global team of Developers selling integrated solutions for large water and waste treatment systems. In addition, Craig was responsible for a new business incubation program for GE Water that focused on translating unique solutions across markets and geographies. Prior to GE Water, Craig lead sales and marketing for Osmonics and was instrumental in their 10X growth prior to being sold to GE.

He is a recognized expert in marketing and commercializing new products, driving global sales growth, and managing water projects across multiple industries and applications. With a career in water that spans over 20 years, Craig has gained extensive global market experience in food and beverage; pharmaceutical; power; municipal; oil and gas; and microelectronics.

May 02 2014

Emerging Leaders Series: Eric Rasmussen, CEO of Infinitum Humanitarian Systems

Eric retired in 2007 after 25 years of service in the US Navy that included 18 deployments and three wars to head Google NGO, InSTEDD. He now leads Infinitum Humanitarian Systems (IHS), a profit-for-purpose social business which provides advanced technology solutions for public health and capacity building in emerging markets. Their focus is Latin America.

As a disaster medicine specialist, Eric has led teams in more than a dozen disasters over the past twenty years, including the Izmit earthquake, Katrina, Banda Aceh, Haiti, Hurricane Sandy for FEMA, and the Philippines after Supertyphoon Haiyan for the Roddenberry Foundation. In addition, he has worked in war zones in Bosnia (3x), Afghanistan (twice), and Iraq (9 months).

Why did you see the need for IHS?
During the 25 years that I was in the Navy, I didn’t see that we were doing enough to support civilians in the war zones where we deployed. Rather than just bringing fire and steel on target to win hearts and minds, I thought that we might have a more engaging influence if we stopped the diarrhea that was killing their children. Where we did it, that proved true. But because we didn’t continue to do it, we’ve lost a little ground.

Ormoc, Philippines. UNHCR distribution. Aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda

What we have found, though, is that water is a dominant issue everywhere in the developing world, particularly in post-conflict regions, but everywhere. There is a fantastic amount of waste in supplying water, for example. The government of Baja California, in the midst of a ruinous drought, quotes a figure of 88 million gallons of fresh water lost every month to graywater runoff into the ocean. They’re professionals, taking their responsibilities seriously, and that drives them crazy. We don’t do enough to reclaim graywater from showers, or to harvest rainwater or to drip-irrigate. Such things are obvious, but beyond supplying enough drinking water in communities, I saw how vital water is for hospitals, and schools, and other civilization services. They can’t work without it.

As a medical doctor with a lot of experience in natural disasters, I have personally known what its like to run out of water. With our team in the response to Supertyphoon Haiyan during November 2013, a supply flight was delayed and we ran out of water. One of the UN teams on site gave us, a team of 14, half of their last third of a jerrycan of water. When that water ran out, we all waited about 12 hours for a water delivery, trying to work, trying to ignore the thirst. Learning experience.

What do you do?
We look at new ways to reclaim used water and purify it for drinking. When we decided on this particular quest we took advantage of my nine years at DARPA and went looking for robust, small scale, energy efficient solutions still deep in someone’s garage. We found some surprisingly good options. There’s a lot of scientific and engineering creativity out there. Some of it has made it to a NASA TRL-5 or so, ready for field testing.

Now the Roddenberry Foundation has funded us, just as a pilot, to look at how we might fill the gaps in current approaches to supplying water during disaster relief.

What is the new solution for water in disaster relief?
IHS, with multiple very cool partners, has developed an approach that replaces single-use bottled water with a long-term water treatment solution on-site. We provide a robust solution during a relief effort and a long-term solution afterward. It saves dramatic amounts of water, energy, and waste, and generates no hazardous byproducts.

Our system is airlifted into an active disaster zones within a few days of the event. Rather than delivering water, it delivers a treatment solution to use the water that’s already there. We have a process to clean almost anything in water—from biological pathogens, to fuels, pesticides and fertilizers, to heavy metals like mercury and arsenic. It’s fast, robust, resilient, simple (though very high tech internally) and runs on renewable energy.

To help understand the problem we were trying to address with a business model, the usual disaster air transport is a C-130 aircraft which carries bottled water on a standardized 463L pallet. A C-130 can carry about 7,700 half-liter bottles on every trip, very roughly a thousand gallons. On the other hand, with that same load, we could ship in six of our units in a single flight and generate at least 500 gallons a day with each one, every day, for months. All we need is a water source in the disaster area, and most disaster areas have many. So instead of bringing in more bottled water by air day after day, that same C-130 can bring in medical supplies, shelter, food, and grieving relatives. Just one of our systems saves a huge amount of fuel and carbon emissions by eliminating more than a quarter of a million pounds of air transport every month.

That one system also replaces tens of thousands of single-use water bottles that litter the landscape of every disaster site for years afterward.

As the emergency response phase moves to recovery and reconstruction, we’ve designed a method for turning over the system entirely to provide a bit of economic benefit (and public health), in the recovery. We’re working with local organizations to help women establish long-term water vending businesses in these communities.

Where do you see the next big challenges for water tech?

At IHS, our opinion is that the challenges we’re about to face are not so much water technology, as:
1) Providing the renewable power for every kind of water purification,
2) Tackling the barriers to change set by policy and legislation,
3) Overcoming cultural barriers, habit and laziness in conservation.

But to stay with just tech, in our view we need to reclaim fresh water from anywhere we can get it, so I’m really excited about some work we’re doing in Mexico. We’re looking closely at some new bio-electrochemistry around bacterial biosolid degradation and the harvesting of transmembrane potentials from the resulting biofilms. The result is the conversion of pit latrine sludge to drinking water that meets all international standards plus a bit of storable energy. As of March we’ve now found it’s scalable. I find that interesting.

Oct 13 2010

Artemis Webinar:”The Art and Alchemy of the Exit”

The transaction that brings a premium to investors and founders of a great technology company is one of the company’s defining moments. Achieving a premium return on an early-stage investment requires communication, precision, and financial savvy.* What are the most decisive challenges for water tech companies in transitioning from a start-up into an industry leader?* What is key to ensuring that an acquisition is the beginning of a new chapter of rapid growth?* When does an IPO offer the best future for a water tech company?On October 21 at 8AM PST, the Artemis Project will host “The Art the Exit.” This webinar kicks off the 2011 Artemis Project Top 50 Company Competition – the only competition specifically designed to evaluate the investment potential of emerging providers of Water Tech solutions.The webinar will bring together a group of panelists that have not only negotiated this process successfully, but are able to offer their insight and wisdom to investors and company leaders.Speakers include:* Judson Hill, NGP Global Adaption Partners* Bill Malarkey, Boenning & ScattergoodWe’ll also hear from CEOs of Artemis Top 50 companies:* Carlos Perea, Miox* Joel Bleth, Solarbee* Brent Constanz, CaleraRegistration for this webinar is limited to provide participants the opportunity to engage in the post presentation discussion. Early registration reduced pricing is available through 10/18.Registration Link: http://tiny.cc/3invl

Sep 17 2010

Bringing Water Design Vision to the “Rest of the Mess” in Real Estate

Shanghai Towers
The Shanghai Tower will serve as a mammoth 125-floor rainwater harvesting structure. The breathtaking outside shell borrows the best designs from nature, collecting rain to purify and replenish 675,000,000 liters of water each year. Combining stores, offices and apartments, the building will serve as an icon for water resource management in China, as the country struggles to find enough clean water for its people and its growing economy.

“Unfortunately, most of the buildings in the world are not Shanghai Towers – most of the buildings aren’t new,” noted Dave Pogue, Director of Sustainability for CB Richard Ellis in the Artemis Project webinar earlier today. “While some of our buildings are new, we also need to be concerned about managing the ‘rest of the mess’,” David Pogue, CB Richard Ellis.

“While some of our buildings are new, we also need to be concerned about managing the ‘rest of the mess’,” Pogue explained. CBRE manages over 1.2 billion square feet of property in the Americas, and the bulk of those buildings are not new. Environmental considerations must contend with budgets. “We have a lot of buildings struggling trying to find a way to be better in a water constrained world,” Pogue stated.While water is vital, it is virtually free today. And water seldom gets attention until there is a crisis. Pogue noted that basic water saving devices such as toilets and urinals generate only a trickle of benefits and take 8 to 10 years to pay back. They’re better than nothing, but still just a small drop in the bucket.We’re still waiting for the onsite appliance that reclaims water and treats rainwater with the precision and beauty of a miniature Shanghai Tower. Small-scale onsite waste water systems operate today, recycling water from sinks and toilets to save over half of the drinking water used by an apartment building. Companies like Dominic Sulik’s Natural Solutions Utilities are offering whole building solutions for onsite water management that match much of the savings from the Shanghai Tower. This offering is a service that pieces together existing solutions.

We can see the crises are coming, but we are still waiting for the Apple version of a building water system that matches the benefits of the Shanghai Tower. “Its not about the cost of water, it’s about the downtime and the risk for the property,” John Macomber, Harvard Business School.“Its not about the cost of water, it’s about the downtime and the risk for the property,” notes John Macomber, Professor of Sustainability at Harvard Business School. If there is a lower cost of capital for a better risk-adjusted return on the property, then onsite water management makes sense financially.

Professor Macomber suggests that real estate properties such as accommodations and hospitality operations—hotels, spas, and hospitals—are examples of some of the early candidates for water tech. “The beach head for water tech is where the landlord pays for the water, where the landlord can effectively measure the benefit of an intervention, and where the volume of water used really matters to the economics.”

May 28 2010

Interview: Peter Williams from IBM

I had a chance to sit down with Peter Williams, CTO of IBM’s Big Green Innovation Unit. We discussed Smart Water, industry trends and collaboration, and the potential for the Blue Tech industry to improve living conditions worldwide. Peter will be chairing a panel on Smart Water at the Blue Tech Innovation Forum in June.

What single improvement to water infrastructure will have the largest holistic impact?

Embedding information technology to allow people to manage their infrastructure more effectively. And allow them to optimize and control the operation of that infrastructure in terms of energy consumption, water delivery and quality, flood risk, or whatever. [Read more…]