Innovator: WindTronics' Imad Mahawili

In December 2004, Imad Mahawili was vacationing with his family in Florida when an earthquake near Indonesia triggered a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people. Watching the destruction of poor villages in Asia and Africa on TV, Mahawili was reminded of the poverty he experienced as a child growing up in Baghdad in the 1950s. "It was heartbreaking," he says.

Mahawili, 62, was then executive director of the Michigan Alternative & Renewable Energy Center (Marec), a nonprofit that helps entrepreneurs launch green startups. But the tsunami had given Mahawili, a serial entrepreneur who holds a PhD in chemical engineering and had sold two technology companies, an urge to build something that could benefit the poor. In 2006 he started working on an idea for a small, inexpensive wind turbine that could provide electricity to rural communities. Three years later he left Marec to found WindTronics in Muskegon, Mich.