William Budinger

Activist, Business leader, Industrialist, Inventor, Parent, Philanthropist, Scientist, Writer/Editor

Bill Budinger was the founder of Rodel, Inc., where he served for 33 years as its chairman and CEO. Bill is an inventor and holder of more than three dozen patents including key processing technologies that helped the return of semiconductor manufacturing to the U.S. in the 1990s. Rodel became the global leader in high-precision planarization technology for semiconductors, silicon wafers and storage media substrates such that by 1995, every semiconductor made anywhere in the world was made with at least one Rodel product. Rodel is now the Semiconductor Materials division of the DuPont Company. Bill is also a founder of the Rodel Foundations. He continues to serve on various non-profit boards including the several Rodel Foundations, the Public Policy Institute, the Aspen Institute Executive Committee, the Democracy Journal, Third Way and the Brookings Institute Governance Studies. Bill served for many years as a founding trustee of the Grand Canyon Trust and was an early trustee of both the Democratic Leadership Council and the Democracy Alliance. Bill has served as a panelist on Talk of the Nation and as a guest lecturer at several universities including MIT and Harvard. His writings have appeared in various law journals as well as trade and public policy magazines. He drafted much of the 1999 patent reform law (AIPA) and has testified on patent, trade and labor law reform before various committees of the House and Senate. Bill has won numerous awards including Legendary CEO, ACS Hero of Chemistry, and the Henry Crown Leadership award. Bill also founded and chairs the Aspen Institute’s Rodel Fellowships in Public Leadership which provides two-year fellowships for top-level Republican and Democratic state elected officials to help them transition from politicians to statesmen. Bill helped create much of the intellectual foundation for the growing realization that the purpose of the corporation is much greater than just maximizing shareholder value. In recent years, Bill has concentrated on building a popular understanding of clean energy and has published a number of articles on the topic.

Corporate responsibility and citizenship. Getting to net zero.

If we depend on wind and solar to do the heavy lifting in the clean energy space, we'll never get deep decarbonization. It's just not physically possible. We need to focus serious attention on technologies that can deliver reliable 24/7 energy on demand.

Chemistry, clean energy, corporate purpose, Physics