Product Strategy — Business Innovation Zone

Renovo: The BIZ Helps Start-Up Connect with Essential Resources

March 2, 2011 By Mike Colwell

Functioning in its sweet spot, the BIZ has recently partnered with Renovo Water of Minneapolis, Minn., to help the start-up company connect with qualified community and state resources needed to grow its business.

Renovo Water, a company recently spawned from University of Minnesota, uses an innovative product to remove contaminants in municipal drinking water systems. Its proprietary technology might sound like gibberish to the average water consumer, but it could be the key to delivering big city water quality to rural communities without the prohibitive costs associated with huge water treatment facilities.

Marc Salmon, chairman of Renovo Water, explains that the company’s focus is really for smaller communities across the world. “Current water cleansing technologies involve significant capital expenditures, heavy maintenance, large amounts of energy, waste disposal issues as well as chemical additions to the water,” he says. “Our system solves these issues as well as being green and flexible. No hazardous material has to be generated, which makes this a very environmentally safe product. Communities won’t have to change their workflow and it can be used in areas that traditional water quality systems have been unable to reach.

“In terms of impacting the community, we’re excited about how this new technology will allow rural areas to have the high level of water quality usually only enjoyed by larger cities,” Salmon continues. “We’re not totally sure about how many jobs may be created by manufacturing. We’re still looking into those details.

“Mike Colwell (executive director of the BIZ) has been a great resource in terms of connecting us with crucial departments and relationships within Iowa,” Salmon says. “He helped us work with the state (DNR) and the Iowa Department of Economic Development. He was great helping us address overall business plan details. Mike’s a good marketing guy as well. He asked us critical questions, which got us thinking about connecting with other partnerships we had not yet thought of.”

Plans are underway to locate the business in Iowa. Piloting of the new system will begin early this spring in Osceola along with pursing Environmental Protection Agency certification. If the system performs as expected in the pilot, Renovo Water will start selling the product in Iowa next year.

Agren: Moving from Service to Software

December 28, 2010 By Mike Colwell

For nearly 14 years, the leadership team at Agren, Inc., had been able to look at a problem and formulate a project to solve it. Its sweet spot was bringing innovation to the point where agriculture meets the environment. When it saw an opportunity to go to market with a groundbreaking software product, however, they turned to the Business Innovation Zone (BIZ) for guidance and encouragement.

“Mike Colwell has been very instrumental in helping us better grasp the software as a service (SaaS) model, and how this software model is priced, licensed, etc., compared to conventional desktop software,” says Jamie Ridgely, Agren vice president of planning and projects.

Creative problem solving
Brothers Tom and Stan Buman created Agren, Inc., in 1996 as a private consulting firm dedicated to helping agriculture find profitable solutions to environmental challenges. They have always enjoyed pursuing projects that stir their imaginations: when they see a problem relating to agriculture and the environment they create an approach to solving the problem, and then identify and secure the resources to make it happen.

From its Carroll, Iowa, office, the company works nationally on a wide variety of projects and issues with local, state and federal agencies, as well as corporations, organizations, foundations and individuals. The current nine members of the Agren team bring diverse backgrounds, skills and talents – including academic degrees in agronomy, animal science, business, marketing and engineering – to every project. Projects range from absentee landowner issues to prescribed fire liability to watershed assessment.

New software opportunity
When states started making LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) high-quality elevation data available to the public, Agren identified a software solution using the data to quickly design ponds, wetlands and waterways; calculate soil loss; and plan other conservation practices.

Colwell helped the Agren leadership team deal with the realities of making an investment to build the product before ever getting to the market. Together, they’ve also written a business plan, developed a pricing model and started preparing for the rapid growth that’s possible when the suite of software products hits the market later this year. The pricing model helps the Agren team look at costs and project income under different scenarios.

“Mike Colwell helped us make the transition from a consultant model to a product-based model,” Ridgely says. “He helped us take a bunch of random ideas and give them the structure we need to move forward.”

eznetpay

September 20, 2010 By Mike Colwell

The web-based payment processing system created by John Trickel adds speed and transparency to the way construction payments are made. With help from the Business Innovation Zone (BIZ), he learned the discipline and focus necessary to build a successful track record in the school construction market. “We’re disruptive technology that automates the payment application process,” [...]

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Athena GTX

August 23, 2010 By Mike Colwell

Many companies in the medical technology field were slow to react in the wake of the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, including the one where Mark Darrah worked. Darrah, however, saw the potential for new types of lifesaving devices and created his own research [...]

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Vision-1, LLC

March 22, 2010 By Mike Colwell

With more than 68 years of expertise in customer loyalty, management, human resources and technology, Lois Pannkuk and Nancy Anderson know that customer service is a fluid experience and it needs to be measured at the transactional level to be of any real value to companies. In 2005 they were awarded a patent on a [...]

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Luke’s Premier Foods: Former Retailer Becomes Purveyor of Fine…Tomato Juice!

November 30, 2009 By Mike Colwell

Jim Hudson blends carefully selected heirloom tomatoes into a gourmet tomato juice that is about ready to hit retail shelves, starting with the East Coast and coming to a store near you. The idea was born out of the taste buds of his grandson, and made possible with the help of Mike Colwell and the [...]

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Gilmore Manufacturing, Inc.: The Wait is Over for Versatile Construction Tool

November 11, 2009 By Mike Colwell

Like the most fortunate of entrepreneurs, Charlie Gilmore identified a need and met that need in an innovative manner. It just took a little longer than he anticipated to get to market. His TooLink(R) coupler is a quick-hitch device that turns a six- to nine-hour job into a two- or three-minute task at a construction [...]

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Canvis, Part 1: Serial Entrepreneur Turns to BIZ for Help Building his Business

November 6, 2009 By Mike Colwell

David Gion is a self-described “serial entrepreneur,” starting out by creating “Hokey Pokey Hankies” in college and going on to develop computer software companies. Gion says the Business Innovation Zone (BIZ) provided just the help he needed to build Canvis, a software business that is part of The Weitz Company, one of the nation’s largest [...]

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