FuzeHub wins top prize in U.S. Department of Energy competition

ALBANY, N.Y. — FuzeHub has won the $250,000 top prize in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) American Inventions Made Onshore (AIM Onshore) prize competition.

AIM Onshore is an initiative that seeks to “bolster American manufacturing and accelerate clean-energy innovation,” per a FuzeHub news release. FuzeHub will use the $250,000 to “further” its impact in AIM Onshore initiative and the training the nonprofit has provided.

The nonprofit says the Build4Scale workshop that it helped organize in Binghamton last October was a factor in winning the AIM Onshore contest.

FuzeHub’s award-winning effort met the department’s objective of “closing the gap” between American inventors who develop new energy technologies and domestic manufacturers who produce them, the organization said.

FuzeHub says it is an Albany–based nonprofit organization that connects New York’s small and mid-sized manufacturing companies to the “resources, programs and expertise they need for technology commercialization, innovation, and business growth.” FuzeHub is the statewide New York Manufacturing Extension Partnership (NY MEP) Program center, supported by Empire State Development’s Division of Science, Technology & Innovation.

The NY MEP is a network of 11 organizations that provide “growth and innovation” services to small and mid-sized New York manufacturers to help them “create and retain jobs, increase profits, and save time and money.”

FuzeHub involvement

FuzeHub was one of four organizations nationwide that DOE named as a finalist and awarded an initial $150,000 prize in 2018. The four finalists leveraged DOE’s Build4Scale training program to “help strengthen” manufacturing in their states or regions. Each organization then submitted an overview of their impact to DOE, which deemed FuzeHub the winner of the AIM Onshort prize competition.

“Our team at FuzeHub is excited about the impact we’ve made during the AIM Onshore prize competition. The funding we earned will strengthen our efforts to help innovators successfully scale their companies and create opportunities for New York manufacturers to produce new technologies,” Elena Garuc, executive director of FuzeHub, said in the release. “Across the state, innovators and manufacturers are doing groundbreaking work, often with support from the NY MEP network, to make New York State a global leader in clean technology and advanced manufacturing. The AIM Onshore prize will help accelerate the progress.”  

As 2018 continued, FuzeHub trained inventors in four economic-development regions of New York, including the Southern Tier, Western New York, Long Island, and the Capital Region. FuzeHub worked directly with clean-tech scaleup partners; contract manufacturers; and business incubators in all-day workshops. Those sessions addressed the needs of early-stage hardware companies, including design fundamentals for manufacturing and prototyping, scaleup tools, and available resources.

FuzeHub also partnered with the NYSERDA Manufacturing Corps (M-Corps) Centers to provide Build4Scale training to their clients. Those centers include Rochester–based NextCorps and Brooklyn–based SecondMuse, which administer the clean-tech manufacturing program for startups in upstate and downstate New York, respectively.

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com