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The Real Story attended Clean Tech Open in San Jose last week, and talked to Danny Gilliland from Driptech, the manufacturer of low-cost drip irrigation systems for farmers in developing countries.

The idea behind the Driptech system, which runs creates water pressure from the gravity inside an oil drum, came to the company founder at Stanford, in a class called “Design for Extreme Affordability”. Looking for a way to provide a way for subsistence farmers in India and China to irrigate crops in the off-season, this simple system of precision-punched PVC tubing was designed at The Farm, and then field-tested in small plot farms in India for a year.

Can Driptech’s low-tech approach to water management be utilized for some of the Bay Area’s burgeoning organic farms? You bet. But you’ll have to take a number… there are a lot of farmers in India and China ahead in line.  For more details, see their website.

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The Real Story took a road trip to San Jose to meet some of the inventors and entrepreneurs participating in the Clean Tech Open, a conference dedicated to bringing ideas together with mentoring to create viable businesses in the clean tech arena.

Rex Northen, Executive Director of the Clean Tech Open, talks today about the history of the event, its goals, and some of the discoveries made along the way. Rex, who built both the mentor program and the investor program for the organization, has seen the concept for this conference grow into five regions across the United States.

He says that often, the hardest thing for someone with a great idea is to share it in the first place, then be willing to test it, stay flexible enough to modify it and work with others to execute it. The garages of the Silicon Valley have been hiding good ideas for years; an event like Clean Tech Open helps the technologists bring them into a supportive environment to explore their potential for production.