Many of the world’s most innovative products have started in universities and academic institutions around the world. In fact, in 1996 Google founders Larry and Sergey began collaborating on an early search engine, which operated on Stanford servers for more than a year—eventually taking up too much bandwidth. So it only made sense to encourage academic researchers to try their skills at the Little Box Challenge to see if they could invent a smaller power inverter and help change the future of electricity.

We received over 100 applications from academic institutions for our Little Box Challenge grants and just announced the 10 recipients. Head on over to the Research at Google blog for the list, but then get back to work on shrinking those inverters!

Posted by Eric Raymond, Google Green Team