Siemens has announced an open-technology challenge with JUMP, a joint initiative between the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and five national laboratories. The online crowdsourcing community focuses on bridging the gap between cutting-edge building technology ideas and the marketplace.

The gap between electricity generation and use could be narrowed with an Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) system that extracts energy from thin air. Actually, the system, called Ground-Level Integrated Diverse Energy Storage or GLIDES, stores electricity mechanically in the form of compressed gas that displaces water in high-pressure vessels.

Four U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories are joining Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to expand an online crowdsourcing community for building technologies called JUMP, which helps bridge the gap between cutting-edge ideas and the marketplace.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that the JUMP initiative is seeking to connect innovators with industry to make the most creative building efficiency ideas a reality. DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and industry partners want to collaborate to solve some of the challenges facing the building energy efficiency industry.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) revealed the first-round winners of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL’s) crowdsourcing competition to advance innovative building technology ideas, and announced a new open innovation program between ORNL and four industry partners.