
Chain Reaction Innovations, the Entrepreneurship Program at Argonne National Laboratory, will be holding its first Demo Day from 5:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on September 12, 2018 at the Gleacher Center in Chicago. Four teams from Chain Reaction Innovations Cohort 1 will be showcasing their technologies and emerging companies to potential investors and the energy community. CRI is the Midwest’s first entrepreneurship program to embed innovators in a national laboratory.
Cohort 1 innovator companies include:


Solid State Electricity Generation

Better Combustion, Better Performance

Cleaner, More Powerful Engines for Heavy-Duty Applications
Chain Reaction Innovations is a two-year program for entrepreneurs focusing on energy and science technologies. Selected annually through an application call, the program enables innovators to work on their technology full-time, reduce R&D time, and de-risk technologies with the help of leading experts and equipment from a national laboratory. Each cohort works to build their innovations into market-ready businesses. CRI is located at Argonne and supported by area mentors from the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago and the Purdue Foundry at Purdue University.
Demo Day 2018 also will feature companies from Innovation Crossroads, an early stage entrepreneurial fellowship program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, including:
- Active Energy Systems – Harvesting low-temperature waste heat for electricity generation
- Sky Nano – Electrochemical production of low-cost carbon nanotubes from carbon dioxide
- TCPoly – High thermal conductivity 3D printing filaments for FDM 3D Printers
Chain Reaction Innovations and Innovation Crossroads are part of the Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Programs (LEEP) from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). EERE created the Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Programs to provide an institutional home for innovative postdoctoral researchers to build their research into products and train to be entrepreneurs. The two-year program is funded by EERE’s Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO).
For more information or an invitation to CRI’s Demo Day 2018, please contact [email protected]