Sachin Joshi, a nepali engineering student in Colorado works for a new kind of stove for people in rural nepal and india.

ref: http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_5121611
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A bright light comes on
Six CSU engineering and business students, taking part in a new, globally minded master's program, have cooked up a stove that generates electricity for developing nations.
By Tom McGhee
Denver Post Staff Writer
Article Last Updated: 01/30/2007 09:54:04 PM MST

Sachin Joshi, right, points out features of the stove that he and five other Colorado State University graduate students developed for Third World countries. The stove generates electricity. (Special)

Two weeks in India taught Colorado State University student Katie Lucchesi that an idea developed in the U.S. might need some tweaking to make it useful to poverty-stricken Indians.

Lucchesi, 22, is one of six CSU engineering and business students who developed an innovative cook stove - and a plan to market it in the Third World.

"You have to decide whether ideas that we think are legitimate over here will work over there," she said. "There are modifications that we need to make to the stove to make them appeal to the people over there. Their pots are rounded, while ours are flat, so a hole in the stove top would be very beneficial to them."

Lucchesi took part in what has become a prototype for a program that CSU's College of Business will launch in August.

The 18-month master of science in business administration program will teach students to use entrepreneurial approaches to address poverty, environmental degradation and other problems in developing nations. Also, it will train students in what it takes to tap into a huge underserved market, said Paul Hudnut, acting director of the new Global Social and Sustainable Enterprise degree program.

Students who want to succeed in business need hands-on global experience in today's economy, said Ajay Menon, dean of the CSU College of Business.

The new program will provide that experience in a socially responsible way that gives students an idea of how to do well by doing good.

"There is nothing better than hands-on global orientation, no matter how well we teach," Menon said.

The stoves recently tested by CSU students in India and Nepal are rigged with a thermoelectric generator that turns energy produced in cooking into electricity that can be used to light a room or power a small television or radio for several hours.

The target recipients for the stoves live in areas where there is no electricity. They rely on kerosene lamps that produce little light.

Using the stove-generated light, families can make jewelry or engage in other activities that will yield additional income, Hudnut said.

While many MBA programs offer international travel opportunities, schools throughout the country also offer courses searching for business solutions to environmental and other problems.

"I believe that every business school has at least one course that has a focus on sustainability," said Jennifer Keller Jackson, grants manager at the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, which provided a $15,000 grant for the CSU stove project, Bright Light Innovations. "It could be green buildings; it could be clean technology; it could be microfinancing. We are seeing entire degree programs being created in the area of sustainability."

The entrepreneurship team grant was one of 16 awarded by the alliance, Keller Jackson said. Sixty-seven proposals were submitted.

"This project hits on several things we value," Keller Jackson said. "It embodies the fact that new values are being taught in engineering departments around the U.S.; it touches on social impact, reduces air pollution and helps alleviate poverty. It is new technology and entrepreneurship with impact."

Dan Mastbergen, a mechanical-engineering doctoral student, helped design the stove with Bryan Willson, director of the CSU engines and energy-conversion laboratory.

In places such as Ahmedabad, India, and Katmandu, Nepal, where the students visited, wood stoves were filling homes with thick smoke, causing health problems.

"Smoke would come into the room, and they couldn't even open their eyes," said Sachin Joshi, an engineering doctoral candidate and a CSU team member who also helped design the stove.

The prototypes funnel smoke outdoors and produce little indoor pollution, said Joshi, 26, who speaks English, Hindi and Nepali. The appliances also use less firewood, reducing the amount of wood a family must collect to cook.

The team's business plan included financing from Sewa Bank, an Indian bank that provides banking services to poor, illiterate, self-employed women. The institution will provide financing for those who buy the stoves, said Lucchesi.

Selco India, which provides infrastructure to underserved households and businesses in India and the rest of the developing world, is also involved.

"We wanted to find ways to make this thing profitable and make it sustainable so we could help these people," Lucchesi said. "Some organizations go in and put in a whole bunch of stoves and then leave. It doesn't help a lot of people, and not for long."

The group hopes to turn the stove project into a self-sustaining business, said Joshi.

"We will be testing for a few more months and see if we can price these stoves properly," he said. "I believe there will be a market, and we plan to form a for-profit business."

Staff writer Tom McGhee can be reached at 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com.

How they're doing it

The business plan developed by CSU engineering and business students to produce and sell prototype stoves:

-Grant money to cover initial testing

-Jaynix in Nashik, India, to build the stoves

-Sewa Bank in India to provide loans to households to buy the stoves

-Selco, an Indian energy-services company, to provide technical support