As a high school student, Eden Full changed the world.
Eden developed an idea to maximize solar energy be creating a panel that rotated with the sun. While at Princeton, Eden collaborated with a professor from Kenya and eventually was afforded the opportunity to travel to Kenya to work out the kinks. To date, Eden has helped over 6,000 people get clean water and power. Her goal for the company is to see it help 1.5 billion people.
What make’s Eden’s story so cool, is the fact that her story continues. She stepped away from the company to finish a degree at Princeton in Mechanical Engineering. Eden’s focus is not on making money, but rather changing the world. It does not take creating an entirely new product, but tweaking a product to make it the most efficient. Eden did not invent solar panels, she just maximized its potential.
All aspiring entrepreneurs can take a page from Eden’s book and look for the small tweaks in industries and products where the market could almost seem impossible to break into. Sometimes the littlest changes can lead to the largest impact.
This is such a good idea, I’m actually really surprised nobody ever thought of this when solar energy was becoming more popularized. After taking environmental science, you learn a lot about the massive inefficiency of solar energy, yet it’s such a great concept. Hopefully this incredible idea can bring us just one step closer to being able to more proficiently utilize the free energy produced from the sun.
I think so often in entrepreneurship we are focused on creating new products, not processes. Full does a great job at taking a product that already exists and making it better with one tweak in its process of collecting energy. Great article!