This Is What Happens When You Interview 40+ Startup Founders and Engineers in Energy

Before I get into what happened during these interviews, it’s worth setting the scene.

These conversations were part of the Duke Design Climate Startup Incubator course. The goal of the course is simple, yet complex: How do we take groundbreaking research happening in Duke labs and bring it into the real world? How do we teach engineers not just to design for innovation, but to design for impact in communities?

The answer, it turns out, is not theoretical.

You bring together a diverse, passionate group of Duke engineering students, professors and cutting-edge technologies; and you ask them to build a startup in a year. Not a fictional startup born from a fleeting idea or a single interesting article, but one grounded in rigorous research, deep market analysis, and a real industry need. As any founder knows, you don’t build a viable startup by reading papers alone. You build it by going out and talking to people.

And so that’s exactly what my team, Middle Earth Innovations, a geothermal energy startup, set out to do.

As a group, we interviewed over 40 people: founders, researchers, venture capitalists, engineers, drillers, homeowners and more. We visited drilling sites, conducted in-person interviews, took calls on buses and during walks to class, and struck up conversations with anyone willing to talk about energy, startups or both. (Yes, you start to sound a little crazy when geothermal energy becomes your Thanksgiving dinner topic.)

The more people we spoke with, the clearer it became that we needed to talk to even more people. And with every conversation, the insights got deeper.

So, what happens when you interview 40+ startup founders and engineers in the energy space? Three words: Ideas. Innovation. Impact.

Ideas emerge in curious minds, and questions sit at the center of that curiosity. These interviews weren’t about telling industry leaders what we planned to build, but simply about learning. Learning startup lessons. Understanding the energy market.

Identifying challenges, opportunities and what day-to-day life in the industry actually looks like. One founder described building a startup as “one big de-risking activity,” a definition my team took to heart. Asking questions, we learned, is one of the most powerful ways to de-risk.

Innovation must be engineered in labs, not just dreamed up in inspired minds. We are deeply grateful to the scientists who dedicate their lives to advancing innovation, even when progress is slow or uncertain. One person we frequently spoke with was Peter Malin, Emeritus Professor of Earth and Climate Science at Duke. His work, among many others, is helping to uncover new methods for tapping into geothermal energy’s full potential. This isn’t innovation happening in isolation or behind closed doors. It’s active, rigorous and field tested. From these experiences, we learned that innovation isn’t passive; it’s built, validated and refined through persistence.

But while innovation may be engineered in labs, true impact is created in communities.

At every step of our startup journey, the message was clear: Even great products can fail in the face of a disengaged or disapproving community. Even well- intentioned technologies can cause harm if implemented without care. Even the most sophisticated solutions fall short when they don’t align with real community needs.

As engineers, we learned to design not just for systems, but for people. To build with cultural context and lived experience in mind. To listen first and build second. To think holistically, rather than settling for a narrow, technical vision. In fact, as we navigated building this start-up to help scale geothermal energy, one researcher reminded us of something critical: While this work has the potential to be life-saving for communities facing energy insecurity, we must also account for the disruptions that come with deploying these systems— noise, changes to daily life and broader community impacts.

Hence, after interviewing 40+ people through this Design Climate course, I’ve come to believe the path toward good engineering can be captured in this line of thinking: “Ideas emerge in curious minds. Innovation is engineered in labs. But true impact is created in communities.”

Indeed, the pursuit of lasting impact through engineering is the goal that guides our work.

Ozioma Ozigbo is a student in Duke Engineering’s Master of Engineering in Climate and Sustainability program.