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LightWorks® Innovation Accelerator

multidisciplinary effort to leverage ASU’s unique strengths in areas of: Solar Electric – Sustainable Fuels and Products – Energy and Society – Food Systems – Energy and Water Nexus.

LightWorks® Innovation Accelerator


Innovation Accelerator Solutions



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Design thinking and innovation

The LightWorks® Innovation Accelerator aligns the value propositions of companies with reliable experts, tools and frameworks that meet their research and development needs. Few challenges are more fundamental to our society than ensuring the sustainability of current and future generations. As a result, we have developed a model which addresses some of the challenges of creating offers that companies may be willing to co-fund with ASU either directly or in partnership with others.

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Building a pipeline

The Accelerator is a hybrid model which links ‘user needs’ to faculty ‘ideas and insights,’ thus improving the scale and impact on sustainability and energy challenges. We use traditional customer engagement but our differentiation is our ability to conceptualize the need, be imaginative in our engagement and deliver a linked solution relevant to the original challenge.

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Impact through development to scale

The Accelerator reduces ASU faculty time required to ‘chase’ these non-traditional research projects by at least 25%. Our Accelerator research partners also benefit from a strong relationship based on links to their outcomes. Our objective is to improve the quality of interactions so that our customers feel that they must talk with ASU. Importantly, our objective is to eventually connect each customer to several relevant research themes inside ASU.





Innovation Accelerator Highlights



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Microbial Communities
Algae, biomass, and
wastewater research


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Restoring the Carbon Balance
CO2 technology, policy, and solutions


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Clean Energy Transition
Military resiliency, innovation and training


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LightSpeed Solutions
Recycling CO2 into sustainable fuels and products






Our Mission:

Our mission is to strategically integrate promising technology and ideas with seed funding, market assessments and economic analysis, thus constantly prioritizing ideas with real world application and a viable business model.

What We Do:

  • Link digital humanities with science and technology
  • Leverage insights with research partners
  • Create collaborative communities
  • Data driven commercialization



Featured Webinars

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How Companies and Municipalities are Using Digital Technologies to Meet Their Carbon Reduction Commitments

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Better Food, Less Carbon in the New Digital Economy

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Prove I Made a Low Carbon Choice – Can smart systems do this?



Innovation Accelerator Personnel