The Carbon Trust Incubator Programme
1st December 2010
Since November 2006 Isis Enterprise has been a ‘Carbon Trust Incubator Partner’ and we have been working closely with the Carbon Trust to build and develop a pipeline of low carbon innovations that have the potential to significantly reduce the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions.
The incubator scheme plays to Isis’s strengths in identifying world beating technologies, developing the technical and commercial case, building a defendable Intellectual Property (IP) position, building a strong management team and securing investment.
The Carbon Trust is an independent company funded by the Government to help reduce the United Kingdom’s carbon dioxide emissions. One aspect of the Carbon Trust’s work is accelerating the commercialisation of promising new low carbon technologies, through a number of different types of support to start-ups and spin-out companies. One of these is the incubator programme, and Isis is one of four partners providing virtual incubation support to early-stage businesses.
The Carbon Trust is looking for low carbon innovations that have proven technology, a good IP position, strong commercial prospects and a promising team. The Carbon Trust targets technologies that have the potential to significantly impact CO2 emissions, and where Carbon Trust support will make a material difference. Typically these fall into the FOCUS or CONSIDER quadrants of the Low Carbon Technology Assessment diagram (see below).
This year we have considered forty potential candidates for the Incubator scheme, and have gone through the prospects in detail with individual inventors and small companies to assess both the strengths of the technology and the commercial case. Some candidates are too early for the Incubator scheme. This can be for a variety of reasons, such as there is no demonstration of the technology, or the commercial case is unclear. In these cases we can provide feedback to the candidate company to enable it to improve its case and we ask to see it approach us again with a stronger case. More advanced proposals are given further scrutiny to really pull out the technological and market cases. This process gets to the bottom of the business case and is in many cases helpful for the company. It provides the company with a rigorous and structured questioning of its proposal and helps define the gaps in the knowledge of the company and its management team.
As a result of this investigation Isis Enterprise can put together a proposal to the Carbon Trust not only highlighting the strengths and benefits of the innovation, but also identifying how incubation can help the candidate develop its business. We can offer a range of consulting activities, and the proposal is tailored to the candidate company’s individual needs ensuring that the consultation process is effective and useful for the developing business’s needs.
Isis Enterprise would be very interested to hear from any entrepreneur or innovative company that has a novel technology with the potential to reduce carbon emissions, has a strong business case, and which is looking for additional resource and expertise to help develop its commercial proposition.
For further information on the Carbon Trust and how the incubator scheme can help you, please either call me at Isis Enterprise or visit www.carbontrust.co.uk.
Services offered by Isis Enterprise as part of the Carbon Trust Incubator Programme
Technical due diligence
Market due diligence
Intellectual property protection
Business model development
Market research
Market entry strategies
Financial advisory
Team profiling and building
Strategy and business plan development
Product development and engineering
Sales and Marketing
Project Management
Licensing advice
Presentation training
