We are all excited to see that the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (YEI) launched its 2011 summer program in its new location earlier this week!

YEI is an incubator for entrepreneurs in the Yale student body and helps them overcome some of the challenges they face starting their new ventures. YouRenew was started out of YEI and we owe a debt of gratitude to the organization for all it has done to help us launch and grow. It has done a terrific job of fostering an entrepreneurial environmental in Yale and New Haven, and gave us the opportunity to work alongside smart and innovative entrepreneurs.

We are proud to say that one of the new ventures is being co-founded by former YouRenew employee Chris Murphy. Chris, and co-founder Greg Hausheer, are launching a website called BookSavr.com, which provides a convenient way for college students to save money when buying textbooks and other class materials.

Other notable ventures that have launched out of YEI include Paper G and TutorTrove. Paper G is a technology company that automates local ad creation, sales and management for online publishers. It was started by an incredibly smart group of guys who have proven themselves as true innovators in the online advertising space.

TutorTrove provides a convenient web platform to assist tutors and educators. Their new product, Desmos, is an online community for interactive teaching. With the large variety of hardware and software in classrooms, teachers face increasing difficulty trying to transition course material from one device to another. Desmos is designed to bridge this gap and become a unifying standard for interactive lessons, letting teachers seamlessly present their material via their computer, tablet, whiteboard etc.

This only represents a small sampling of the companies coming out of YEI. I would suggest visiting the site to see some of the new ventures launching this summer.

We wish the best of luck to the YEI entrepreneurs starting their challenging journeys this summer!

One of my new favorite ideas is the ‘$300 House’, a concept first presented in the Harvard Business Review blog by Vijay Govindarajan with Christian Sakar. In creating this idea, the authors sought to find a way to build livable, sustainable and well engineered slum housing that cost no more than $300 per unit.

Slum homes are often built on dirt floors with cheaply available materials such as cardboard, mud or clay, and other scraps. Their poor designs make them susceptible to disease, fire and rapid deterioration. These homes can become money pits for the owners who are stuck spending their already limited resources on expensive upkeep. The authors’ new design will include cheap and effective solutions to improve sanitation, ventilation and overall durability. They also propose the use of solar panels to reduce the home owner’s future energy costs (as well as the world’s overall GHG emissions). This idea has since taken hold and generated a large following.

The Economist calls it frugal innovation or reverse innovation – “the art of radically reducing the cost of products while also delivering first-class value”. This often involves simplifying a product, making it more durable, or adapting it to the needs of the developing world. We have seen frugal innovation at play in the second hand electronics market, which has provided affordable technological products and helped developing countries overcome their lack of telecommunications and PC infrastructures.

If the homes are produced in large enough quantities, the scale could economically justify the mass production of durable materials and world class designs. The authors are hoping that an economically feasible plan will help attract for-profit companies such as GE, IDEO and Siemens. GE in particular has already adopted frugal innovation for medical devices they market to developing countries, so hopefully this product will be a good fit!

If you’re interested, you can check out their website at www.300house.com to follow their progress.