Estimating market size depends on four different cuts of market data

 (1)demand,
High demand for energy solutions by venture capitalists investment and subsidies. If people and business are able to overcome high initial costs, demand will be much higher.

(2) addressable market,
Commercial, municipal, and residential use (solar works pretty well in most overcast) around the continental US.


(3) realistic opportunities vs competition,
Opportunities are there but the competition is very substantial and many overarching partnerships and political connections are established. I don't want to be a reincarnation of the Tucker so it is best be clandestine until I have a proven product, cost, and buyers before threatening someones turf.

(4) targeted selection of "winnable" market opportunities
The best is commercial markets, a lot of solar is directed to residential and the potential for returns from a power and heating aspect are higher which will help sweeten the pot for a business to buy our installation service.

Tell an engaging story about your business plan product/service.

Well, by profession I'm a thermal design/applications engineer in NH and my company specializes in producing thermal management solutions that lead to production orders that we have made in factories overseas. Our markup is on a per-part basis and the engineering service is included. So, I'm used to working on new projects every week and if I have all the modeling information, I can have a quick turn around to our clients. While working on the designs for this GoveGreen Project, I get a model from a company in California (I will NOT name) trying to use solar concentrators to heat a fluid and power photovoltaic. My thought was holy cow! all done they beat us. Well truth be told after my work for this company, their design was so radically different that they neglect the very premise of our patent plans, heat reduction to boost efficiency of the panel. I also suspect they rely on tons of subsidies, where as GoveGreen is potentially starting out with family funds (Not my family) to develop a solar utility in southern mass on private property and use that as a launch pad for the heat exchanger technology. Exciting!!

How do you interact with others? What is your leadership style? How does that affect the team around you?

My leadership style is something that has evolved over the years from my experiences. Over the last decade since I graduated high school and left home for my life with the United States Army. This was probably the greatest spectrum of awful to exhilarating experiences and I was exposed to various leadership styles and problems that had to challenged. I found that leaders often marginalized their people and were left out of the equation as it pertains to the problem. Eventually, this causes unnecessary misery and hardship and poor performance and retention of quality, competent personnel. These experiences coupled with my personal background where I developed a fair sense of Independence and self-reliance because of the early death of my father when I as a child.  I found effective leaders were good communicators and would provided direction and clarity to their organization. However, leaders are not ordained that privilege by others, they need to prove it and live it in every aspect, often working longer and harder than their subordinates. This is what I strive for when it really matters, somebody needs to push the group momentum forward if you are to survive because success tastes so sweet. I also recommend the political writings of Jerry Pournelle in his Sci-Fi military novels: really goods analysis of human leadership and politics in bureaucracies.

Can a company today survive on inbound marketing?

Can a company survive on inbound marketing? It would obviously depend on the company's business model and the market they are competing in. However, it is safe to say that inbound marketing has taken over as the preferred means of relaying advertisements.

As compared to TV, radio, and print advertising. Blogs, forums, pod casts, and social media are considerably less expensive. As consumer's in a fast pace environment, we are saturated with media advertising and we only give 3-5 seconds of interpretation to a traditional advertisement before discarding it. Inbound marketing has the advantage of receiving potential clients searching for the best product and price from the start. It is up to the quality of the web site  and the product/service to engage the costumer into action. The successes of Amazon and eBay tie into this, products do not generally sit around on a store shelf, costomers are actively engaging the seller for the product without any significant advertising. Active costomers are likely to buy a particular product, the issues is how does a company sell their product/service by these resources to their preferred target audience?
The cost of the product or service will determine how much effort must be taken to engage a costomer. Costomers will compair competing/ similar products more rigorously. Providing adequate resources whether it be video, studies, discussion forums, or trials can do this well.

I'm not saying outbound marketing is not without its place, just saying I can't afford a 5 million dollar Super Bowl ad!

Why Big Companies Can't Innovate Big Time!!!

Sorry for my absence from these blog updates, I've been swamped at work and in my Numerical Methods class.


Firstly, when anyone in the United States thinks of Gerber products, the image of that blue and white baby face label immediately comes to mind.

So Gerber has some very real challenges branching out with a new product when they are so strongly branded across the cultural landscape. The idea was sound and the market opportunity is there, however the administrative and bureaucracy which tends to define the architecture of a large company will alter a good idea until it is perverted into an impotent liability.

What a large company can do to avoid these issues is to search for a potential solution by seeking a small start up that has a lot of the initial work done on that product segment and offer a partnership where the larger company can bring the venture capital, manufacturing, distribution, and marketing to develop a potentially successful off-shoot.

Photovoltaic Thermal System- Pain/Gain

 

Many market factors are affecting the viability of the renewable energy market: political, societal acceptance, and economic.

The demand for electricity grows as well as the pressure to keep electricity prices competitive. However, the energy infrastructure is tapped out in several parts of the United States, namely California. Additionally, recent regulations fro the EPA regarding allowable emission by fossil fuel power stations are prohibitive of investment in more power plants as well as zoning for new projects. Additionally, power losses are substantial for as distances increase from the source. Our contention is local sources of energy are the most efficient means of addressing future energy requirements, particularly for commercial and residential applications.

The proposed innovation is an evolutionary step that addresses the main problem conventional photovoltaic technology; heat. A problem inhibiting the efficiency of solar panel sun-energy conversion rate is overheating. Systems have been introduced to the industry which attempt to lower the surface temperature of panels by spraying water on their surfaces, which cools the panels by convection heat transfer with turbulent air flow. We will market a Photovoltaic panel the has an integrated heat exchanger whereby the waste heat from the panel is used to supplement the home heating applications while keeping the panel cool for more efficient operation. Similar systems being used today saw efficiency increases from 17%-22% to as much as 30%.

The average residential monthly use is approximately 920 KWh in the United States, though it varies by state and month. By assuming a modest average of 3.0 of solar energy production for each collector, and an approximate solar collector surface area of 2.5 mit can be figured that two solar thermal collectors would be enough to provide approximately half of the average United States family’s energy needs per month. This corresponds to an approximate monthly savings of $65.80 (a U.S. average of 10.4 cents per kWh), but since most energy providers enforce a price per KWh increase for any usage over 1,000 kWh, these savings can be even more prominent. If, for example, a family paid $4,000 ‘out of pocket’ for installation of this particular solar thermal system, it would pay for itself after five years. In most cases, these Solar Thermal  Energy systems have life spans of around 20-25 years, making the investment worthwhile.



 

Toyota 3A report

Any work environment has the potential to yield process issues and bottle necks that will compound and reduce productivity. To address process issues, Toyota has developed the 3A report, a simple and elegant storyboard that depicts the following seven actions in sequential order: process environment, current issues, desired outcomes, analysis, actions, plan, and benchmarks for determining success.

My interpretation of the 3A report is that they are tailored to addressing process issues in a simple sale pitch fashion. The fashion at which that information is conveyed will be unique to the target audience. A 3A report attempting to resolve an engineering or technical issue to an engineer or manager will less simplistic by assuming a particular experience level and thus convey a greater details in the problem description and solutions. An Assembly or laborer would require simplistic details and information to be effective, hopefully the problem that is expected to be resolved by them is equally simplistic.

Regardless of the target audience, a quick presentation is ideal because time is a premium at work and if that attention of the reader is not attained within the first 5 seconds, likely they would discard the message and nothing would be accomplished. 3A reports implement story board illustrations and process frustrations, these key features draw a reader to key points and flow sequentially to that conclusions where the readers responsibilities will stem from. The critical thinking and contemplation is relatively minimal since the writer has already fed the analysis through the story.

Lastly, the desired action and analysis MUST be accurate and correct in addressing the particular problem. Otherwise, fault finding and reduced credibility in 3A report will hinder effectiveness future reports produced.