Joule Unlimited lands Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award

In Massachusetts, Joule Unlimited is the new 2011 Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award Winner in the category of Energy, chosen for its transformational approach to highly-efficient renewable fuel production. In addition, Joule received the Silver award across all of the competition’s 16 categories, for which there were over 600 entrants from around the world.

As stated in the Journal’s report by Kenny Tang, one of the independent judges and founder & CEO of Oxbridge Weather Capital, “In bypassing the limitations of expensive processes in conventional biofuel production, Joule’s technology has the exciting potential to significantly transform the economics of the biofuel industry. If translated into wider use, it is a potential game changer–it could become a cost-effective replacement to petroleum on a much wider scale than previously possible, especially with its non-reliance on biomass.”

To select the award winners, a team of Journal editors and reporters reviewed the entries and forwarded 155 to an independent panel of judges from venture capital firms, universities and other organizations and companies. From that pool, the judges chose a total of 35 winners and runners-up in 16 categories. The judges assessed entrants on the following criteria: whether the innovation breaks with conventional ideas or processes in its field, whether it goes beyond marginal improvements on something that already exists, and whether it will have a wide impact in its field or on future technology.