IEOR Blog Post #13

Taking all of the feedback received last week my team and I re-vamped our final pitch. This time we included more in-depth analysis of the finances and took another look at the business plan to ensure that licensing the technology was the most efficient business model vs actually manufacturing the flywheel and selling them ourselves. We decided that licensing the technology was the most efficient route to go. The last thing that we need to finalize this week is our ask because we are still unsure of what that should be.

In addition to this, I had a very interesting phone call with Leslie Eudy of National Renewable Energy Laboratory. She pointed me to an interesting website that detailed the market growth for renewable energy in various bus transit companies all over the country (including data about AC Transit used here in the bay). The data showed us that there is definitely a trend towards flywheels/hydrogen fuel cells in the future and showed us that AC Transit aims to implement a zero emissions policy in their bus system by mid-2017 and I think the flywheel would be useful in implementing that. There were also multiple publications on the website that detailed the financial trend towards flywheels/hydrogen fuel cells because although the price for implementing flywheels is currently slightly increasing this cost is expected to go down by mid 2017 and actually end up saving money for AC Transit within the nest few years. According the Eudy, the only reason why there is a slight trend in increase of funds currently is because there is required training for bus drivers to operate these new cars, required training for mechanics to understand how to fix any problems that could be caused by the implementation of this new system and also because AC Transit has invested in new buses.

The website can be found at this link: http://www.nrel.gov/hydrogen/proj_fc_bus_eval.html

IEOR Blog Post #12

This week was very exciting because we drafted our final pitch! It was great to see all of our market research coming together to help us consolidate our final product. I personally worked on formulating the target market and the business model.

One of our earlier presentations for this class listed the TAM as all vehicles, the SAM as hybrid vehicles and the SOM as hybrid vehicles in the US. However the team quickly realized that these weren't realistic and we also switched gears to target buses and mail carrier vans instead of vehicles. Due to this I changed the TAM to be buses and mail carrier vans in the US, the SAM to be buses and mail carrier vans in California and the SOM to be buses and mail carrier vans in the Bay Area. We have reached out and spoken with representatives from AC Transit, FedEx and USPS. We have chosen these businesses to be out target market because the fly wheel system will work best when implemented in vehicles that stop and go often.  In addition to this, buses and mail carrier vans are large and therefore will use more energy.

Looking at the business model we decided to license our patent to public transportation and mail carrier van manufacturers such as North American BUs Industries and Grumman LV.

This upcoming week we will be finalizing our pitch!

IEOR Blog #11

After our discussions with Rick and Tal last week we decided that to be more on track with our project it was necessary that we reach out to more industry specialists in hopes of finally getting in contact with someone. We went back to the the drawing board and re-drafted our emails and tried reaching out to multiple people. We also called new contacts that we had found through further research of public transportation systems. Over break we had some successful interviews. The most important one was with Bart's sustainability director, Holly Gordon. She believes that although the flywheel technology is still quite new it could have potential use in the train system. It will have both significant impacts on cost and the environment. Bart currently uses the RCR technology, and she did mention that the Flywheel technology might not be very useful for Bart in specific but she did refer us to the public transit companies in the greater Chicago and Boston areas (as they use the regenerative breaking technology). Stijn and I also went back to the Professor who invented the flywheel because we had a few more questions to ask him. In our correspondence with the co-founder of Tesla. he said that he did not believe the flywheel system would be effective in electric so we went to the Professor who invented the flywheel to better understand his vision for the flywheel. He clarified and said the the flywheel is best used for hybrid cars because electric cars already efficiently use the battery system and make use of braking energy. With this clarification we better understood the patent. For the upcoming week the team will get together and make a draft of the pitch. 

IEOR Blog Post #9

Aims for this Week:

1) Get more responses from surveys we sent out

2) Compile data from the surveys and follow up with companies that we have not heard back from 

This week we also had an interesting correspondence with Marc Tarpenning from Tesla. He used to work at Tesla and provided us with valuable feedback about the flywheel system. He said that he did not know how feasible the flywheel would be to implement in vehicles because the efficiency of most motors in electric cars is already optimized at 80%-90%. This is a bit worrying so we will be going back to talk to the Professor who invented the flywheel once we get back from break. 

Plan for the Future:
Talk to the inventor to ensure that the flywheel is a useful and innovative product and meet with more companies to see if they would be open to implementing the flywheel in their public transportation systems.

IEOR Blog Post #8

This week we changed our market to be public transport. Aiming specifically at buses because they are a common from of public transport in big cities. By implementing the flywheel system in buses we aim to capitalize on a unique market. In addition to this, by implementing the flywheel system in buses we will be making them more cost-efficient and energy efficient.

Last week in class we listed a couple of customers to contact. So far we have successfully gained an interview with AC Transit and Tesla. We will be contacting them next week. We are still waiting to hear back from customers such as Muni, Nissan, VTA, Toyota, etc.

IEOR Blog Post #7

This week Team Patent decided to finalize our patent for this class and we ultimately chose to work with the flywheel system. To better understand the product, we decided to meet with the Professor who designed the product a second time to better understand his vision for the flywheel. However this did not work out because he was not his office hours. Instead we will be following up with this next week.

The team believes that in order to find a niche for the flywheel product is it imperative that relook for unique markets to introduce the flywheel into. For example, certain companies in San Francisco offer Go-Kart tours of the city and we were consider the Go-Karts as a potential market we could capitalize on. Upon further research of Go-Kart tours, the team discovered that they are not unique to SF but rather offered all of over the world in places such as Barcelona and Vancouver. This means that there are thousands of tourists renting out these Go-Karts everyday and if the flywheel system was implemented in them we could make the Go-Karts more sustainable and energy-efficient.

IEOR Blog Post #6

Feedback on Group

Overall I think my group works well together. We are open to each other’s ideas and can have a constructive conversation about patents and products that we would like to build using these patents. Everyone is very helpful and very encouraging. As a team we decided to choose a patent that fit the health and fitness sector because it is a booming industry. However is it has been difficult trying to reach professors associated with this patent and we have started to look into patents in other industries. For example, last week in class we presented a flywheel patent which was very interesting. It's main purpose is to be implemented in cars to make them for efficient. I do not have a background in this though so it was not the most ideal patent. This past Monday, me and another teammate met with Askash to discuss potential options for where to go from here. He mentioned that if the patent had a publication along with it then we didn't necessarily need to go talk to the professors about their patent, rather the discussion with the professor was to get some more background information about the patent. The sweat patent we were interested in had a publication with it so it might not be necessary to go talk to the presser about it. However later that day, the main point of contact fro the sweat patent got back to my group and said because the sweat patent was already in the works for a startup it may not be the best option. He said he would talk to the people in charge of the start up and get back to us. If that does not work out we may decide to go with the MEMS Ultrasonic Imaging Patent. I am a little concerned that we may be a little behind in this class but I am hoping that as soon we hear back from our contact with the sweat patent we will have a more clear direction of what we would like to do going forward.  

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