Today was huge for the slimy green stuff in San Diego.  The United States’ two largest city newspapers, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, did in-depth reports about the burgeoning algae business in San Diego.  (See “Interest in algae’s oil prospects is growing” and “Algae as Fuel of the Future Faces Great Expectations — and Obstacles”).  Speculations about the commercial viability of algae as fuel, like any other scientific/business development, are purely speculative.  All the expert opinions on ESPN about the next Chargers game have no impact on the outcome of the game.  What we do know for certain about the Chargers and about algae is that the games will be played.  The question is will the championship game be played in San Diego?

Could it be that San Diego is approaching a tipping point (oozing point?) in its quest to become the world’s dominant algae biotechnology center?  At what state of maturation do we say, “now you are a cluster”? 

Minds and money work best when concentrated.  Concentrated brains and bucks are common attributes of all technology clusters. 

San Diego’s algae-intellect is big, broad and been around for decades.  There is no place in the world where more people are working to advance the commercialization of algae than in San Diego.  The substantial tech community of universities and research institutions provides a local pool of minds to grow the industry.  These San Diego brains have more algae companies to work for than any other city in the world.  Our local algae companies, research institutes and scientists are number one in patents relating to the development of algae as a source of fuel.  San Diego’s rich history of success in biotechnology provides lessons-learned for the emerging industrial biotechnologies.  For 25 years, San Diego’s business accelerator, CONNECT, has nurtured a collaborative spirit in the tech community so successfully that they have been the model for a score of CONNECT-like organizations around the world.  This spirit of working together is a founding tenet of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology, a consortium of about 20 research institutes, universities and private companies focused on algae solutions.

The two biggest financial deals in algae have been with San Diego based companies.  In July, Exxon Mobil ear-marked $600 million for Synthetic Genomic’s algae work.  Last year, Sapphire Energy was bankrolled for $100 million by VC’s.  Because algae is much later to the alternative-energy game than solar or wind, it has yet to receive fair fiscal recognition from the feds.  This will come in time.  In the meantime, local companies SAIC and General Atomics have garnered over $31 million of military research contracts for algae biofuel.

The concentration of minds and money puts San Diego right at the tipping point of claiming the title of the dominant algae biotechnology cluster.  Two things are needed to earn the crown.  The mass of the algae nucleus must pull algae players to our region.  Sapphire energy was a San Francisco brainstorm that came to San Diego.  More such moves are needed.  And lastly, to be headline-worthy, a dynamite name is needed.  If I had something catchy, I’d tell you.  I don’t.  Send me your brilliant idea.  I’ll make sure you get full credit for naming the next great technology cluster in the world.

Innovation Clusters Create Competitive Communities

Read what Jonathan Sallet and Ed Paisley have to say about Federal funding to support the innovative effort of organizations like CONNECT.  (Link to story).

Tags: Exxon Mobil, General Atomics, SAIC, Sapphire Energy, SD-CAB, Synthetic Genomic

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Algae, Biofuel . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.