CalStart Helps Steer Entrepreneurs
CalStart is a nonprofit organization that helps high-tech transportation companies develop and sell their products. Its incubator programs in Pasadena and Camarillo are helping 17 companies formulate, produce and market pollution-free and energy-efficient transportation systems and components.
Among the projects CalStart has helped shepherd are a two-passenger electric car in production in Norway and hybrid vehicles powered by both electricity and gas. Here are the three questions that entrepreneurs most often ask CalStart, answered by Vice President Bill Van Amburg.
Question: Where can I find the capital to get my transportation-related business going?
Answer: There are a number of private companies that are interested in new technologies and that might want to be involved in a project for a variety of reasons. They could be a natural gas or electric utility. It could be an aerospace contractor. It could be a large supplier to an auto or bus maker.
Secondly, a number of public agencies want to spur U.S. industries to be global leaders, and they want to spur solutions to societal problems like pollution. They have been great partners in bearing part of the cost of pushing these new technologies out into demonstration models. I’m talking about the U.S. Department of Transportation, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, to some extent the U.S. Department of Commerce, and a number of others that have said, “Where we are getting some societal values and where we can help push American technology forward, let’s see where we can get involved.”
What we try to do is help structure a project to get a number of people to share the risk and cost, so it isn’t just one company trying to do it all. We try to get a team of companies and public partners together, where it makes sense, to demonstrate the value of a new technology. We’ve done, over the last seven years, about 130 technology demonstration and deployment projects.
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Q: Who can I link up with to test the marketability of my product?
A: We try to provide companies we work with regular information on what is going on in the marketplace, so they can see some of these opportunities develop and who they should contact. Then, on a more specific level, we have been a resource to some of our companies on individual projects where we have actually done market research with them--whether it’s for an incubator company or one of our larger companies looking at a new product they’ve got and trying to figure out, OK, where’s the fit? So on a number of different levels, we can just give them basic guidance and steer them to the right information, or we can just do the market assessment and analysis work for them.
What we try to do is track a number of different things, both domestically and worldwide. There are some interesting driving forces in the market right now, some of them regulatory, some of them societal, in terms of the need for more efficient and cleaner transportation. Some of that obviously is dealing with emissions standards and urban air pollution, and some of that deals with the Kyoto Agreement on global warming concerns.
No. 2, we look at what is going on with consumer demand and changes in demographics. For instance, we try to figure out how people want to drive, how they want to own vehicles, what are their day-to-day needs for transportation and what other services could help them meet those needs.
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Q: Is anyone else doing what I want to do? Where can I find the latest information about this industry?
A: In many ways, this industry feels the way the early computer industry did, in the sense that things are rapidly changing. The technology is moving at a rapid pace, and what you knew six months ago isn’t what’s real today.
Via our Web site, we post four new industry news stories a day. We also try to put up the latest reports, analyses and other data we find on a regular basis. We also keep a current list of all the clean-fuel vehicles, from bikes to buses, that are available in the marketplace and who the contacts are. Then we have a full database of the players in the industry.
We do this partly just to help keep the momentum going and allow people to find contacts and make connections as quickly as possible.
Separate from that, we also have other custom services. Twice a year, we do a global tracking of the latest developments in transportation: What are the environmental drivers and regulations worldwide that are changing? What are the new technologies that have come out? And what are some of the strategies of the players and the companies involved?
We also are publishing monthly conference digests. Instead of going to 50 conferences a year to try and keep up with what’s going on, we publish something to track leading-edge industry conferences to keep people abreast of who’s announcing or claiming what.
If you don’t keep up on where the current market opportunities are and where the current technology developers are, and who’s doing what, you could end up on a technology-development course that has already been done by somebody else.
CalStart can be reached at (626) 744-5600. Its Web address is https://www.calstart.org.
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Send questions to Karen E. Klein, Los Angeles Times, 1333 S. Mayflower Ave., Suite 100, Monrovia, CA 91016, or e-mail kklein6349@aol.com. Include your name, address and telephone number. This column should not be construed as legal advice.
