March 25, 2022
Learning the Business of Building Technologies
Each year, the IMPEL+ program begins with Pitch Coaching Workshops that guide small businesses, entrepreneurs, and researchers towards crafting the fundamentals of a pitch. This year, IMPEL+ has expanded its curriculum specifically for mid-TRL Innovators looking to develop a comprehensive business plan framework. This second phase of the program–named the IMPEL+ Business Seminars–are accelerated and iterative seminars that dive deeper into Innovators' revenue models, go-to-market and sales strategies, competition and differentiation approaches, and more. In its inaugural year, these Business Seminars were held across three consecutive days in March.
Participants included fifteen Innovators, down-selected from the initial 45 who participated in our Workshops. Leading the sessions and providing individualized feedback were Jagjot (JJ) Singh, Co-President of Stanford Angels and Entrepreneurs, and Christina Ellwood, CEO of Moreland Associates and a scientist and marketer.
The Business Seminars also featured speakers from the U.S. Department of Energy who introduced three initiatives of key interest to these Innovators:
Ram Narayanamurthy, Program Director of Emerging Technologies and Buildings R&D described how buildings can be remade into into clean and flexible energy resources by combining energy efficiency and demand flexibility with smart technologies and communications to inexpensively deliver greater affordability, comfort, and performance to the U.S. building stock through the Grid-Integrated Efficient Technologies (GEB) Initiative.
Ed Vineyard, Senior Advisor at the Building Technologies Office demonstrated the role that Energy, Emissions, and Equity (E3) Initiative will play in transforming the heating and cooling marketplace, making affordable, clean and efficient solutions more easily available.
Joan Glickman, Program Manager for Residential Buildings Integration presented the Advanced Building Construction (ABC) Initiative, which integrates energy efficiency solutions into productive U.S. construction practices for new buildings and retrofits.
Innovators also pitched in rapid-fire succession to these influential public sector leaders from the DOE, showcasing both their technologies and their learnings from the IMPEL+ program.
Participants came from a broad range of professional backgrounds and technology readiness levels. Peter Grant, a Senior Scientific Engineer from Berkeley Lab, noted "I'm a researcher by trade, and I have very little entrepreneurial training, business model development training. I've done [another program], but it provided high-level thoughts and didn't dive into the nitty-gritty like this. So the fact that I can get this training for free–from investors and coaches directly–is incredible. I don't know how I could get this feedback otherwise."
As the founder and CEO of a building energy-relevant ultracapacitor company, Jose LaSalle also found the seminars helped his pitch deck become more compelling towards potential investors. "I love that from Day 1, we got to see an example of what "Good" looks like. Overall I really feel the incredible benefit I got from this program, which was in storytelling."