The bottom line is that John Ellis and Dennis Carmichael, the founders at ERT Systems, chose to approach the same problem from a different path, and it brought success.
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ERT Systems is an Ann-Arbor based company whose product is a wireless system that keeps track of firefighters in a blazing building. It's a helpful (and hopefully life-saving) invention, one that the Ann Arbor Fire Department plans to incorporate into its program soon. But enough about doing good for the world, what I want to look at is how it could make a lot of money.
ERT is not the first company to make a product like this one. However, ERT uses different materials than all the other companies, and so they have the easiest on-scene deployment on the market in the market.
The bottom line is that John Ellis and Dennis Carmichael, the founders at ERT Systems, chose to approach the same problem from a different path, and it brought success. As it turns out, using innovative techniques and materials to do the same thing is a good way to start a new business.
For example, take the solar panel industry. Right now, more than 90% of existing solar panels are made with silicon. Soliant Energy, the solar panel company I worked for last summer, was based upon a simple principle: use less silicon than everybody else. This new way of using the same materials was a great selling point for the company, and that's how we got investments.
There's also a new technology called CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide) in the solar industry. By staying away from increasingly costly and hard-to-find silicon, companies such as HelioVolt are trying to build a successful future. CEO B.J. Stanberry said, "CIGS will have a significant portion of the market within 10 years." Using different materials than the other companies in the market may work very well for HelioVolt.
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