The shifting imperative of national labs
In an era of increased climate urgency, national labs are “seeding the market with winners.”
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Historical images of national labs, alongside a charge-coupled device wafer (Image credit: Department of Energy)
Historical images of national labs, alongside a charge-coupled device wafer (Image credit: Department of Energy)
This is the first in a two-part series about the Department of Energy’s Cradle to Commerce program. The second part is a profile of ElectricFish, one of the companies that is a part of the program, and is linked here.
The 17 national labs that dot the U.S. are perhaps best known for such high-profile undertakings as the Manhattan Project and the Human Genome Project. They operate largely separately from tech trends and policy upheavals, humming in the background as the market moves through short-term booms and busts.
Their long-standing imperative: developing technologies to address the world's steepest challenges. And in recent years, the energy transition has loomed increasingly large.
But the transfer of that technology from lab to market has historically been a slow endeavor. Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory, for example, began working on the development of lithium-ion battery cathodes in the 1980s. The first vehicle to use that technology as its main power source, the Tesla Roadster, didn’t begin production until 2008.
To date, speed to market just hasn’t been a priority for the labs, said Carol Burns, chief research officer at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
“We know we innovate, we know we translate that innovation into technology, and we know we can commercialize,” Burns told a room of entrepreneurs and scientists gathered in an old Lawrence auditorium high above Berkeley in mid-July. “We have not yet optimized the timeline.”
But faced with the urgency of the present climate moment, things are picking up — and the role of the national labs is changing. The people running the labs — overseen by the Department of Energy — are increasingly aware of their potential to accelerate the development of technology solutions to meet the moment.
Cradle to Commerce
Last spring, DOE’s Office of Technology Transitions announced the first cohort of a unique program, designed to pair entrepreneurs with key pieces of intellectual property from the labs and get them to market in as little as three years.
According to its founder Reshma Singh, the so-called Cradle to Commerce program, funded by DOE’s Technology Commercialization Fund, is an acknowledgement that the imperative for national labs is shifting.
“There has been a subtle but tectonic shift,” Singh told Latitude Media, pointing to a recent flurry of entrepreneurial programs at individual labs around the country.
But Cradle to Commerce, which brings together four national labs (Berkeley, Idaho, Argonne, and Oak Ridge) is the only program of its kind. And its role is distinct from that of venture capitalists or more traditional accelerator programs or tech incubators.
“What’s coming through national labs is so robust and technically validated, and we’ve done a couple projections to make sure that we can actually seed the market with early winners,” Singh said. “If we can seed 100 companies…they probably have a better chance of success in achieving their goals than other companies.”
In other words, as Argonne National Lab commercialization director Ilya Kats put it, the labs “exist to de-risk technologies” by exploring the “hundred ways something doesn’t work.”
“A startup would be lucky to try one or two things, and it will take ten startups to fail before one will succeed,” he said. But the labs, backed with federal funding, have spent years working through all of those potential pathways to find the one that’s a potential winner.
“We’d be happy to share that expertise,” he added. “The true benefit is the knowledge that our technical and scientific research community has that the industry can learn from.”
Inside the program
Singh and her team submitted a funding request to DOE for the Cradle to Commerce program, or C2C, back in 2022. They proposed a new structure to streamline the pipeline of vetted technologies from labs to commercialization, by putting them in the hands of entrepreneurs earlier.
The program is structured in cohorts. A handful of teams at a time are chosen to pair with intellectual property (IP) from the national labs, which they can either apply to existing companies, or use to spin out entirely new ones. They can use lab test beds and prototyping facilities, and access a network of early commercialization partners, advisers, and investors.
In its first year, the program yielded three new startups built from scratch based on lab IP, and matched three existing startups with IP. There are another five licenses in the works.
Unlike the Inflation Reduction Act’s wider Technology Commercialization Fund, which supports one-to-one engagements between startups and national labs, Singh characterizes what they were proposing as “many-to-many.”
“We were really focused on, how do we make these engagements almost a matrix or infrastructure commons for climate tech,” she said. The resulting program targets three primary means of streamlining the lab-to-market pathway for cohort companies.
The first took place well before applications for the first cohort were even open, and involved paring down the thousands of available IPs to just those that were the most promising for the program’s domains of focus: buildings, nuclear, renewables, and grid modernization.
“We identified and specified the IP which we think will have traction in the market, because it’s fulfilling a specific market gap,” Singh said. Ultimately, the coalition of investors, scientists, and industry representatives landed on 111 IPs to make available to C2C cohorts.
Then there’s access to the scientist and test beds of the labs themselves, which Singh described as a typically “arduous” process. To ease the bottleneck, C2C developed a master agreement across labs, turning the program into a “one stop shop” for access and allowing companies to engage with multiple researchers across multiple labs.
Finally, Singh said, the program is streamlining access to both federal and private funding, depending on a company’s stage. Cohort members have access to both potential VC investors and later-stage funding from DOE.
Where labs go from here
C2C has IRA funding for a total of three years. But given the urgency of escalating global warming and energy transition timelines — and the major unknowns facing the fate of that funding in November — they’ve tried to “fast-track” the program, which means that consecutive cohorts will overlap at times.
Mark Petri, who leads the Electric Power Grid Program at Argonne, said that it’s often those programs focused on applied research that have a more challenging time with an administration change, whereas others tend to be more “buffered from politics.”
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“The nice thing about fundamental scientific research is everyone agrees it's worthwhile,” Petri said. ”You can look at U.S. competitiveness and economic growth and link it directly to investments in research and development.”
However, he added, there are clear trends when it comes to what any given administration considers important, pointing to the example of hydrogen research as particularly vulnerable to political whim.
“We’re pretty good at navigating the changes of where administrations may go,” he added, “but that’s not to say that there aren’t times where an administration says ‘we’re just not going to fund this anymore,’ and then we have to rethink how we allocate our human resources.”
That potential uncertainty is part of the impetus behind C2C’s funding structure, said Singh.
“We’ve been thinking about the program’s sustainability since day one, and part of it has been we’ve been able to bring in an equivalent amount of funds from the private sector,” she explained.
Private sector contributions have tended to be in kind, she added, meaning labor, equipment, and facilities, rather than cash. That cost offset could mean that, in the event the program wasn’t granted additional funding by a new administration, it could continue.
“We’re hoping that through whatever initial proof points that we provided, we should be able to attract other funding,” Singh said, pointing to the potential for philanthropic funds to step in as financial backers.
“But whatever happens with administrations, whatever happens with the boom and bust cycles in the private sector, national labs are there for continuity, and we’ll continue to seed the market with the right kinds of technologies,” she added.
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Work with Latitude’s expert team of storytellers, producers, and marketers to create impactful campaigns that generate leads and enhance your brand’s thought leadership.
Work with Latitude’s expert team of storytellers, producers, and marketers to create impactful campaigns that generate leads and enhance your brand’s thought leadership.
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