What happens when you turn Canada's brightest young minds loose on a challenge that bedevils people two and three times their age?

That's the experiment that happens at 12 university campuses across Canada in the Shad Valley Program for gifted teenagers. The result is a staggering deluge of creativity, innovation, frustration and exhaustion. Most importantly for Canada, more than 600 of our best young people go away with a whole new package of skills, ranging from business plan writing to building prototypes and winning presentations.

Shad Valley started in 1981 as the brainchild of scientist Derek Lane-Smith, who wanted his own children and other Canadian teens to have an experience that combines science, math, engineering and entrepreneurship, in an active and exciting way.

"I was concerned that we weren't seeing young Canadians starting companies like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, even though we knew they had the ability," he said. "They just needed to know how to get that first $5,000 from the bank and start a business."

Tom Keenan photo
What happens when you turn Canada's brightest young minds loose on a challenge that bedevils people two and three times their age?

The first Shad program ran at an Ontario high school in 1981, moved to the University of Waterloo in 1982, expanded to the University of Calgary in 1984 and the University of British Columbia in 1986. Students from across the country apply in a competitive process and attend during July.

The Royal Bank started supporting a national competition among the Shad campuses in 1998. A theme is selected and each campus creates five or six projects, one of which advances to the RBC Entrepreneurship Cup, which will be held this fall in Waterloo. The competition is judged by a panel of academics, entrepreneurs and other people interested in helping youth.

This year's theme was The Great Canadian Energy Challenge. Shads across the country were challenged to find novel ways to either save energy or produce it more efficiently.

As a long-time Calgarian, and having been involved in Shad Valley Calgary since 1984, I couldn't wait to see what they came up with - and they didn't disappoint me.

My group of 12 students started by finding real-world energy problems that are crying out for a solution. They settled on the problem of "energy vampires," those pesky chargers that drain electricity even when they're not doing any useful work. You see them on cellphones, cordless phones, tools and office equipment. According to their 30-page business plan (we limited the length for environmental reasons), "it is estimated that only five per cent of the energy drawn by a cellphone charger is actually used to charge the phone."

The group created a power-switching cradle called the Vampire Slayer and established their target audience as anyone who owns a cellphone, which of course includes most of them.

They set their price at around $16, but high-tech entrepreneur Shawn Abbott, who helped judge the presentations, said they should be looking at $10. Team member Andrea Cowan, from the Kitchener area, said they would consider the idea because "it would be easier to break into the market at that price point."

If they actually went into this business, they'd be manufacturing the Vampire Slayer in Shanghai for about $6 a unit. One interesting twist is that they realized they are in a dying market, since newer electronic gizmos have chips to reduce power consumption. So they forecast revenues peaking after three years and then declining but, as team member Benjamin Desclouds of Whitby explained, "by then we'll have a new product developed."

Another energy-saving idea was a plan to retrofit super-market refrigerators and freezers with individual compartments that would minimize energy loss through opening doors. Their research revealed that the efficiency of a cooling system is decreased by as much as 28 per cent when the doors are left open.

These students believe they can provide their solution at a lower cost than buying expensive new equipment.

A third idea related to the energy generated, and wasted, as fitness fanatics pedal away in the gym. The Shad "company" called Slim Power plans to make gyms more eco-friendly by selling generator-equipped stationary bicycles and related equipment. Their hope is to reduce or even eliminate dependence on outside power. The inspiration for this may have come from a visit they made to the windmill farms in southern Alberta.

Since this particular Shad program is located in Calgary, it's only right that some of the projects would focus on the oil and gas industry. One group proposed the use of geothermal energy to generate the steam needed for oil recovery. They pointed to the use of geothermal energy in Scandinavia and the significant, and growing, consumption of natural gas in oilfield operations.

Probably the most "blue sky" concept was to use nanoparticles of iron to help bring oil to the surface. The "Ferroil" group of students believed that this novel method of oil extraction would reduce freshwater usage over the current method by 90 per cent.

Unlike most 17-year-olds, these students actually like to talk to adults, and contacted a number of oilpatch types to pick their brains.

Shad Valley stresses business communication, both in oral presentations and writing. The Ferroil students came up with some heavy-duty prose to explain their idea: " ... the polarity of the electromagnets will be cyclically manipulated in order to 'pull' the crude oil up to the earth's surface. The nanoparticles can then be removed from the crude oil by thermal manipulation of the surfactant or an acid-base neutralization reaction in order to reduce the stability of the ferrofluid, followed by magnetic extraction or discrete filtration of the nanoparticles."

Through the month of July, the students were mentored by 10 handpicked young and not-so young staff members, who live in with the students 24/7. One staffer recently graduated from Princeton. Another is studying physics at Queen's University. I serve as both the program director and computer science professor.

Entrepreneurship and innovation instructor Thomas Kenworthy was our business guru. He came away pleased and a little amazed by what the Shads accomplished in a month, noting that "the professionalism and confidence displayed by the young Shad students equals, if not exceeds, that of many significantly older and more experienced MBA students."

Most of the students came out of their nerve-racking business plan presentations with smiles. As Benjamin Desclouds said, "I'll never forget the look on the judges' faces when we had the answer to one of their toughest questions."

With any luck, he'll have the right stuff when he faces venture capitalists for real.

(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)