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Fresh ideas will always shake up a market.

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Filed under: Automotive | ERT Systems, LLC | Innovation | Renewable Energy | Solar Power

There's also the auto industry. If we look at purely Hybrid-Electric Vehicles (HEV), we can see that the struggling Ford and GM have found hope in the Ford Escape Hybrid and the Chevrolet Tahoe Hybrid. Ford wanted to have the first Hybrid SUV; it has done just that, and has seen financial improvement. The Tahoe Hybrid increases gas efficiency from its non-hybrid counterpart by nearly 29%, and will probably sell extremely well to those who need a powerful SUV. HEV have shaken up the market among the big automakers themselves, and whichever automaker (be it Ford, GM, Toyota, Honda, or other) makes the best-selling HEV will have a lot of power in the market.

Plug-In Hybrid Vehicles (PHEV) are even more interesting to examine. The new techology has allowed new companies to try to grab a piece of the multi-billion-dollar pie. Some of the most important companies that you have never heard of are Tesla Motors, Phoenix Motorcars, and the Lightning Car Company, all of whom are fighting with the likes of Chevrolet's Volt to bring their PHEV vehicles to the market first. It's been a long time since we've seen so many new car companies, and all it took was some innovation.

All these industries share the commonality that innovation in materials has brought change. Although the industies that they belong to had already been created, companies like ERT Systems and Phoenix Motorcars have a great chance to make a name for themselves. Fresh ideas will always shake up a 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.

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Filed under: ERT Systems, LLC | Innovation | Renewable Energy | Solar Power | Start-Ups

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.