News Meet the man changing the world – a step at a time Entreprenuer Laurence Kemball-Cook – BusinessCloud

Laurence Kemball-Cook is not your typical entrepreneur. Described by The Daily Telegraph as a boy genius, last month he got Prime Minister Boris Johnson to jump up and down on his award-winning flooring and the image immediately went viral.

His company Pavegen has wonthe backing of the richest men in the UK, the Hinduja brother, and his technology will be used in the creation of $7.5bn Bleutech Park in Las Vegas, billed as the worlds firstenergy-efficient mini-city.

Our vision is to cover every single city in the world with our technology, said Kemball-Cook.

Our involvement with Bleutech Park will be instrumental because it will get us to a point where we can mass produce our kinetic energy tiles.

A keen mountain climber, Kemball-Cooks green credentials are evidencedfurtherby the fact that he lives in an eco-sustainable house boat in London and even has a pet duck called Billy.

His story begins after graduating from Loughborough University with a degree in Industrial Design and Technology. He joined E.ON and worked on a sustainable street lighting project but it didnt work out.

Undeterred, the entrepreneur founded Pavegen in 2009 and - five years of research later - invented a floor system that instantly converted kinetic energy from footfall into off-grid electricity, data and rewards.

Today Pavegen has installed over 200 permanent and experiential projects in 36 countries but the most memorable one remains the first.

Kembell-Cook broke into a building site in Londons South Bank and installed his first ever prototype in the concrete floor. As people walked over the floor they created energy and it was enough to convince a company called Westfield to place a 200,000 order.

The rest, as they say, is history. Today Pavegen has grown to 50 staff and Kembell-Cook has worked with iconic companies including Adidas, Coca-Cola, Google, Heathrow, Lexus, Samsung and Shell.

Recent installations have included smart city developments, retail destinations, sports stadia and education establishments in Hong Kong, India, Korea, Thailand, UK and USA. Clients include Abu Dhabi International Airport, Google and Siemens.

Highlights have included creating the worlds largest energy harvesting floor with Google to launch the companys new flagship smartphone in Berlin and powering a building in Hong Kong by a running track that surrounds it.

According to their website the technology works like this. Each footstep on a Pavegen walkway generates between two and four joules of off-grid electrical energy or around five watts of power for the duration of the footstep. Bluetooth beacons in the system connect to smartphones, rewarding users for their steps and generating permission-based analytics.

Pavegen is still a sub 5m revenue company but its founder is thinking big. His vision is simple. He wants people who walk into work in the morning to power the lights on the way home.

Kembell-Cook says programmes like Blue Planet with Sir Richard Attenborough and the work of teenage environmentalist Greta Thunberg have made sustainability real and a priority.

Away from Pavegen, Kemball-Cook is a regular keynote speaker on technology and entrepreneurship, speaking all over the world including at CES, the RSA, London Tech Week, GITEX and the Conservative Party Conference.

The entrepreneur is passionate about smart cities but says they should be created with people in mind and not machines.

Kembell-Cook is one of 12 speakers taking in BusinessClouds SmartTech conference on February 12. The other speakers include James Backhouse, CEO of Skarp; Niko Kavakiotis, head of building performance and sustainability at Siemens Building Technologies; and Dawn Embry, director of strategy and performance at Mobica.

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News Meet the man changing the world - a step at a time Entreprenuer Laurence Kemball-Cook - BusinessCloud