Hi, welcome to my blog. Over the years I’ve been called many names (some of which cannot be mentioned in polite society) Skipper, Phil, “Mad Professor” Townsend and now - more appropriately, I guess - “Wild Phil.” I’m an entrepreneur who loves to innovate, invent, and tinker with ideas and technology.
As a teenager raising cattle in a farm outside of Muncie, Indiana I would look at passing by car registration numbers and wonder if they were perfect squares or cubes. When it came time to decide on college, it was only natural to that naive 17 year old that I should go to MIT.
The fact that I was the first person in my family to go to college did not bother me a bit. I ended up getting my diploma in Economics and Chemical Engineering. Afterward, I attended Purdue on an NSF Fellowship and obtained a Masters in Chemical Engineering.
My industrial background came next during 5+ years with Shell Chemical in Houston, where I did and supervised chemical process design and development and managed chemical plants. The entrepreneurial bug in me, however, made me realize pretty soon that I was better off being my own employer, so I went back to school at Harvard’s Doctoral Program in Business. 
I wore a T-shirt that said “Harvard, because not everyone can make it into MIT” while pursuing my business doctoral studies at Harvard Business School teaching management of technology to the MBA students.
However, just short of submitting my doctoral thesis, bigger opportunities in form of the world’s first energy crisis beckoned me back to Texas.
Houston - the Bayou City - has been my home ever since. I founded several companies including Phillip Townsend Associates, Inc. a leading global benchmarking company and Townsend Solutions, a global consultancy on plastics and materials.
I was also chairman and part owner of a large utilities services company which had 2,000 employees across 23 states in the US for clearing and maintaining electric distribution lines. 
Some of my other fun ventures include Wild Phil’s Buffalo Ranch.
So what’s the big idea?
Why blog, and why now?
I started this blog for several reasons:
- to create a space to discuss ideas and innovations we’ve encountered to build a more sustainable industrial ecosystem
- to connect with individuals and companies involved in making a difference
- to build an idea platform for some of the more “wacky” solutions we come across in our day to day activities (some of our most innovative ideas come straight out of the field, not the corporate labs)
- to rant and rave, and occasionally bring something worthwhile to the innovation table
- to invent better ways to collaborate across the value chain and make these ideas happen
Won’t you join the conversation?
You can contact me at phil [at] philtownsendideas.com ยป
