The L-Prize 2.0

The L-Prize 2.0

By Don Peifer

If you Google “Big companies and Innovation,” you’ll get an endless stream of scholarly articles explaining why big companies can’t innovate. One article went so far as to state that not only are large companies not equipped to innovate, they are designed to be bad at innovation. It makes sense. Resources in large companies don’t generally go to identifying new problems and new solutions; they go to greater operational efficiency with the solution that got the company to its current perch. With shareholders to please every quarter, tactical thinking consistently trumps the strategic. Innovation is mostly achieved via acquisition.

It is against the backdrop of this widely-held belief that we have the latest instalment of the DOE-sponsored L-Prize. With a prize money pool of over $10M, it is a competition that is designed to attract every manufacturer in the land. The goal, according to the L-Prize website, is to “catalyze transformative LED lighting innovation, products, and impact.” But, given the sponsor, it is clearly designed to reduce energy consumption in key applications, which is laudable. By targeting commercial sector lighting, which accounts for 37% of national lighting energy use, according to the website, the prize encourages competitors to prioritize sustainability and efficiency.

Historically, the L-prize has been the playground of the larger players. In 2011, Philips won the first L-Prize for their A-lamp replacement, despite not hitting the price target. The question hovering around the first prize was whether it was truly innovative, or whether it just tracked slightly ahead of the state-of-the-art. Said another way: would we have had a true LED incandescent replacement without the L-prize? Absolutely, although it wouldn’t have happened nearly as fast. Philips—and any other large player in the game—understood that $10M was a negligible line item in their annual revenue roll up, but they also saw the incredible marketing potential that came with the check. So, they threw resources and money at winning the competition, including critical cross-licensing of technology. It was a full-court press from a large company, and the result was “innovation” that to this day populates many sockets.

Philips Lighting won the 60-watt replacement bulb category of the Bright Tomorrow Lighting Prize (L Prize) competition in 2011.

Photo Credit: Signify

Where the past L-Prize targeted LED replacement A-lamps for residential applications, this installment aims at the A-line luminaires in commercial applications. The judging consists of three rounds: a concept phase, a prototype phase and a fully baked system. This year’s L-Prize appears to again favor the larger, more established companies that can afford to throw considerable resources at R&D. Entry to the initial round is open, but the requirements are prohibitive—at least from the perspective of fleet-of-foot, bleeding-edge start-ups. Let’s take a hypothetical scenario to illustrate the point. Say you are part of a small (less than 10 people) company that has developed an optical solution that would facilitate a paradigm shift in the spacing requirements, leading to power density reductions by 50%. That is exactly the kind of thing that the judging committee is looking for. Unfortunately, performance covers only a small fraction of the judges’ scoring requirements.

CATEGORIES AND REQUIREMENTS

Performance: Output, Efficacy, Lumen Maintenance, Driver Lifetime

Color: Color Rendition, Chromaticity, Chromaticity Maintenance

Controllability: White-tunability, Dimming, Luminaire-level Control, Sensor-ready and Upgradeable

Human Factors: Glare, Flicker

User-Friendliness: Modularity, Disassembly

Networking: Technical Interoperability, Application Interoperability, Addressability, EnergyReporting, Control Strategies, System Resilience, Fault Detection and Diagnostics, GridServiceability, Ease of installation and Reconfiguration

The categories and requirements above illustrate a breakdown of the judging criteria. The requirements fall loosely into six main categories. The overwhelming majority of the requirements are designated to networking. So, if you were the previously described start-up with a breakthrough performance technology, but without a clear networking plan or the resources to address outlier events like load-shedding, your application would be in danger of falling through the cracks. Given the limited performance requirements of output and efficacy, your innovative and potentially impactful solution may not even register.

The DOE has attempted to counter-act scenarios like this by playing match-maker for smaller companies who may not be able to surround the specification. They offer to connect the dots with other applicants in the same boat, but whose technologies may have synergies with your own. That’s well-intentioned, but who knows if the companies can work together to come up with a viable, holistic solution? Larger players, as seen in the previous L-prize, are much more adept at realizing an end-to-end strategy.

Despite the sense that the competition is set up to go to one of the Bigs again, I think it is important to zoom in and try to imagine the throughput. It appears the DOE—in setting these requirements—is basically creating a wish list for the product of the future. They are saying, “Attention lighting industry, this is what we want proliferated through the commercial built environment in 5 years.” That wish-list luminaire is impressive! All the boxes are checked: performance, quality, lifetime and smarts. If you consider where we were just two decades ago, the improvement would be shocking. Which brings me back to the original L-Prize: Philips/Signify announced the results of recent testing on the A-lamp replacement that won the original prize. After 90,000 hours of testing (a hell of a long time given the duty cycles in the average home,) the lamp had lumen maintenance of over 90% and an average chromaticity shift (u’, v’) of less than 0.003. However, you wish to look at that, it’s a win. It’s a win for Signify, but it is also a win for the consumers who took a chance on a new technology. Perhaps, the DOE, in crafting the L-Prize, has figured out a way to do the impossible: create a venue where large companies can leverage their various business units and resources to create a product that is not only innovative but, ultimately, massively impactful. Does it look like your typical, piecemeal innovation where company A creates one innovation and company B creates another? Not really, but, given our current environmental crisis, who cares? The ends will certainly justify the means. Good luck to all the applicants.

Editor’s Note: After Don Peifer authored this story, designing lighting (dl) learned that his “Smash the Bulb” concept was recognized as one of the concept phase winners for the DOE L-prize. Good luck, Don!