New EE/RE blog

Every year or so, I teach a strategy elective to SJSU MBA students, which is entirely about the issues facing high-tech companies. Although I’ve occasionally brought in biotech, those who know me and my resume would not be shocked to hear that it’s pretty much all IT, all the time.

The last few times I taught the class, students have been interested in pursuing alternative energy or other cleantech topics (such as plug-in hybrids) as their term project. However, given the structure of the class, it’s hard to tie the project to the class concepts (and thus get a good grade) without course readings that bear on the topic.

So this year I vowed to push outside my comfort zone and do something to meet this student demand. For Fall 2008, I have added a week on alternative energy, starting from a very comprehensive Stanford case (actually, industry note) on the energy industry. I also hope to write my own case on photovoltaic energy, with help from a local tech entrepreneur.

As part of this journey of teaching, research and personal discovery, I decided to do what any good blogger would do: create a new blog. My hope is to stay focused on energy efficiency and renewable energy, since many of these will allow me to stay in the EE (rather than chemistry) technical domain.

However, what I think is new is that I intend to focus on the economics (i.e. business viability) of these topics. I believe that this is relatively under-covered, although I’ve found a few sites that talk about these issues (sometimes). That also means no more cleantech topics on this blog, because I think they are separate (if overlapping) audiences.

I expect that blog to be relatively low traffic, perhaps once every week or two, rather than 3x-5x/week for this blog. I have a constant amount of time available to blog, so I will need to allocate my time carefully to those topics where I can make the most original observations (in a reasonable amount of research time).