Each quarter Friess Associates, managers of the Brandywine Funds, share samples of innovative ideas that cross their research team’s radar screen even though opportunities to invest in them may lie in the future or never surface. Some of these innovations might be showing up near you already while others fail to evolve into practical applications. Here are some recent ideas:
- No-Drill Dentistry. Researchers at the University of Missouri and their commercial collaborators based nearby at Nanova Inc. appear poised to make dentists more popular thanks to a new, painless way to prep cavities for fillings. Their “plasma brush” uses chemical reactions to appropriately clean and disinfect a cavity in less than 30 seconds, changing the tooth surface to form a bond with the filling that the researchers say is 60 percent stronger than a filling done on a drilled tooth. Human clinical trials are planned for early 2012. If the FDA approves the product and Nanova attracts investors to help launch it, the company believes dentists could be using the plasma brush by late 2013.
- New Heights in Wind Power. Fiscal woes within the E.U. leave many would-be recipients of economic development dollars wondering whether such funds exist anymore. KiteGen, a company founded on a single Italian inventor’s idea, hopes to take off whether government backing comes through or not. The KiteGen system consists of a series of kites tethered to a rotating, ground-based turbine, which generates energy via torque created by the kites. By taking to the clouds, the kites tap into winds with strength and consistency not available to conventional windmills. KiteGen believes its system can generate the same amount of energy as a wind turbine farm at a far lower cost while occupying about 98 percent less real estate. After successfully testing a mobile prototype, KiteGen hopes to attract funding to complete its first full-size model.
- Lessons in Climate Control. According to the Department of Energy, a thermostat controls about half of the typical homeowner’s energy bill. That makes the thermostat a potentially rich source of energy savings, yet most thermostats are poorly programmed, if programmed at all. A Palo Alto, Calif.-based company called Nest offers an innovative programmable thermostat that aims to maximize the efficiency of a home’s heating and cooling system by learning from the activities of the people in the house rather than they’re best guess at the schedule they keep. Based on a user’s adjustments upon waking up, leaving for work and so on, the Nest thermostat learns to keep the optimal times and temperatures for a given homeowner’s lifestyle. The Nest thermostat, which sells online for $249, can also be controlled via laptop, smartphone or tablet.
- Coming Soon: Solar Energy – In 3D! Although the role of solar energy in modern-day power generation is expanding, obstacles remain that prevent truly widespread use. Flat photovoltaic panels, for instance, are generally less effective at higher latitudes where the amount of available sun varies greatly by time of day and season. Tests by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology show that adding a little dimension to photovoltaic structures goes a long way toward solving that problem. Open-topped cubes and other three-dimensional shapes the MIT team installed on a campus building are capturing sun at lower angles, increasing captured light via reflection and otherwise outperforming flat panels. Based on their results, the MIT team believes 3D structures can raise the amount of energy generated by flat panels that occupy the same sized footprint by as much as 20 times.
Editor’s Note: Founded in 1974, Friess Associates, P.O. Box 576, Jackson, WY 83001 manage more than $6 billion in the Brandywine mutual funds, www.brandywinefunds.com, as well as separately managed portfolios.
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