Solix Biofuels uses a Colorado State lab to test its algae-based formulas.

Fifteen years ago, Bryan Wilson was a young Colorado State professor looking for some space for his new lab. There wasn’t anywhere for him on campus, so he headed out into the community surrounding the university to find a good spot for his work. He came across the long-abandoned Old Fort Collins Power Plant, first built in 1936. He did what any aspiring scientist would do upon encountering an 30,000-square-foot industrial space with no bathrooms: He asked the city if he could have it—and they said yes.

“But the university wasn’t eager to take on this huge white elephant; they said, ‘You can do this, but you have to make it a freestanding enterprise,’” Wilson says, and so the Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory (EECL) was born.

Today, EECL has come to serve as a technology incubator, providing know-how, testing infrastructure, and workspace to fledgling companies. Already three startups have spun out of its doors, and Colorado State is now launching an ambitious new program headed by Wilson: the 100-faculty-strong Clean Energy Supercluster. The program, following two others in the health sciences, could supplant older models of technology transfer, and speed much-demanded scientific advances into the market.

Though it generates $2 million a year in contract research revenue, EECL also receives funding from Colorado State University. The arrangement also set the table for an unusual public-private partnership that could be a model for how to commercialize clean technology developed in American universities.

Perhaps the most recycled “green” material is the phrase “breakthrough technology.” Almost everyone involved with cleantech seems to believe a sustainable future will only be achieved through developing new ways of serving markets with new products. Many point to the network of American universities as just the infrastructure necessary to research such a future, but moving innovations out of the lab and into the marketplace presents enormous challenges.

In 1980, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which aimed to help federal research hit the commercial market, in part through improved technology transfer activities at universities. By creating a uniform policy that allowed small businesses and nonprofit organizations (such as universities) to own the intellectual property rights of inventions driven by federal funding, the legislation offered universities the opportunity to more easily monetize the outcome of research. While the legislation did help strengthen technology transfer departments at universities, few programs show a high rate of return on their invested research funds.