Innovation Ecosystem Overview
EARTH contributes to transformative changes across the HVACR ecosystem that EPA estimates will have a cumulative net benefit of more than $272 billion from 2022 to 2050, and will reduce refrigerant leakage rates and increase energy efficiency equivalent to eliminating 171 million tons of CO2—roughly equal to the annual emissions from 1 of every 7 U.S. passenger vehicles. EARTH research generates new scientific knowledge, engineering products, human behavioral change, and environmental policy impacts.
Unfortunately, HVACR systems and markets have been slow to address global environmental challenges. To accelerate innovation and uptake of new ideas emerging from EARTH research, EARTH coordinates a multi-institution educational culture with supporting infrastructure that fosters innovation and entrepreneurial mindsets throughout the HVACR research and education ecosystem. EARTH advances promising technologies by connecting innovators to entrepreneurship and industry resources and partners.
EARTH’s HVACR research and pedagogy model intentionally highlights transdisciplinary inquiry and experiential learning, permeates organizational boundaries, and drives new interdisciplinary programs and innovation and entrepreneurship infrastructures to promote research, teaching, and outreach. EARTH collaboratively leverages and coordinates key IE stakeholders (e.g., OEMs, suppliers, startups, national-labs, regulatory agencies, professional organizations) and local-government facilitators to expand the impact of already-significant entrepreneurship centers/programs and infrastructure (EPSCoR states, NSF I-Corps Hubs) across member campuses and communities.
EARTH Industrial Membership Program is a fee-based industry consortium from across the HVACR industry (e.g., technology developers, OEMs, distributors) with an interest in accelerating specific areas of HVACR research, education, and innovation. A tiered annual fee structure is based on options for IP and industry/entity size. Size-based memberships allow broader participation (major corporations, mid-sized companies, and small businesses/startups) with benefits according to members’ needs and interests.
The program enables strategic advice from industry on needs and challenges and helps accelerate R&D progress and technology transfer. Representatives from core partner universities and industry members work together in the EARTH Acceleration Team and the EARTH Innovation Steering Committee and in planning and partnering to co-host innovation fairs and road shows, thus engaging entrepreneurship-facilitating experts at both strategic and tactical levels to help EARTH drive HVACR innovation synergies.
Core Partners' Innovation Ecosystems
EARTH builds upon deep entrepreneurship infrastructures at the six core partner universities to coordinate and nurture a multi-campus, multi-disciplinary endeavor to tackle key HVACR innovation, entrepreneurship, and scale-up challenges. The campus innovation infrastructures include strengths such as NSF I-Corp participants, a variety of accelerators, incubators and research parks, various education programs, and others—all of which enable and accelerate EARTH’s innovations.
