
The Milken Institute California Summit was held November 8th in Los Angeles, California. The Milken Institute works to support the three pillars of their mission: widening access to capital, creating jobs and improving health. The Milken California Summit was organized because: “…persistent challenges related to human capital, infrastructure, water, and taxes threaten to impede economic growth [In California]. To help establish a roadmap to meet them and to ensure economic growth and investment, the Milken Institute’s 2017 California Summit will assemble leaders in business, government, academia, and philanthropy for wide-ranging discussions about the state’s future. Our goal is to make sure California’s economy remains vibrant and the state continues to be a nexus of business and innovation.”
Ian McEachern, CEO at Open Ag Supply, a GrowBlade Alpha test site, was invited to present at the Milken Institute California Summit. He brought a low cost, community-developed alternative to the MIT Open Ag Initiative Personal Food Computer, featuring a Light Polymers GrowBlade 300 flat-panel grow-light. Proprietary Crystallin® remote phosphor-film allows us to deliver high-efficiency custom-tailored growing-spectra in a thin, rugged package. Ian also told the Open Ag Supply ‘story’ during a ‘Made in California’ panel session that featured several California-based start-ups. There’s a video of his talk on the Milken Institute website (Ian’s talk starts at 31:30).
Light Polymers’ GrowBlades provide a simple, low-cost solution for high-quality LED horticultural lighting. The thin ½” form factor of the GrowBlade Edge model allows growing closer for both power savings and maximum yield per sq. ft. These advantages are coupled with competitive pricing that makes the GrowBlade a natural choice for horticultural operations of any size.
Light Polymers is a nanochemistry company with deep domain knowledge of lyotropic materials, which have many applications including LCD and OLED flat panel displays, LED lighting, advanced building materials and biomedical assays. GrowBlade lighting will be available to select customers for Beta testing in Q1 2018 and available generally in Q2 2018.