Innovation and Entrepreneurship Strategies for EcoSync: A Green Technology Startup

Overview of EcoSync: A Green Technology Startup

This assignment is designed to enable you to develop critical skills and knowledge related to innovation and entrepreneurship allied with marketing strategy for new market creation and growth, based on analysing published sources and reflecting on your participation in ‘real world’ problem-solving. Many commentators argue that a large arena of future economic growth will be based on so-called ‘green technologies’, some of which aim to reduce CO2 emissions and the carbon footprint of human activities. Buildings and construction together account for 36% of global final energy use and 39% of energyrelated carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions when upstream power generation is included (World Green Building Council, 2017). Some argue that this figure of 39% will reach 50% of global CO2 emissions by 2050. Quite apart from the harmful impact on the earth’s ecosystem that excess CO2 emissions represent, there are economic drivers for minimising those emissions as products of energy loss. Thus, EcoSync point to the potential waste of millions of pounds spent by larger organisations on energy bills when they argue 70% of their heated rooms are empty and 40% of the energy is wasted! EcoSync has come up with an ostensibly simple solution addressing the issues of CO2 pollution, cost and wasted energy: stop heating empty rooms! EcoSync co-founder Dr Zsuzsa Mayer observes “We have created a cloud-based platform for existing building technologies such as room booking systems and heating controls to synchronise and communicate system responses so we can provide heating for occupied areas only. We use IoT devices, machine learning algorithms and an innovative hardware-free occupancy detection technology to identify empty rooms and create responsive heated zones where needed.” 
EcoSync is an early-stage green technology start-up, a spin-out company from Oxford University which has developed a smart remote temperature control system for older commercial buildings. Tracing its birth to a project using technology to help meet a ‘Carbon Innovation Challenge’ set by the University, the team that became EcoSync helped the Estates Services department to achieve their carbon reduction target of 30% across Oxford University’s building fabric.

Dr Mayer notes that with 35% of commercial buildings in the EU being at least 50 years old, EcoSync is in a position to offer a retrofitted solution that has been successfully implemented in 15th Century buildings as well as 19th Century buildings. The product is suitable for a broad swathe of buildings including hotels, hospitals and office buildings across UK, Europe and North America.
As a start-up, EcoSync’s first ‘value proposition’ focussed on reducing energy bills and used a subscription-based pricing model allied to a website (under development) designed with that business model in mind. Now in the next stage of development, EcoSync want to focus on a new value proposition which is about the environmental impact of heating systems and their carbon footprints. So, while the technology is the same, the target market is different. For example, in the case of a university, the target client is not the facilities manager or energy manager but university deans or top-level decision-makers who care about the impact and the reputation of their universities in environmental terms – i.e. not just about energy bills. Additionally, the Covid-19 emergency has caused EcoSync to think again about the target market - keeping universities and offices but dropping hospitals and hotels from the target market given they have greater issues than energy bills and environmental considerations at present. EcoSync intend to focus more on real-time occupancy detection in their offering as this is relevant to social distancing and current space management issues in offices and educational buildings.

The coursework comprises two elements. The first element asks you to investigate the entrepreneurial journey of a particular start-up company. The second element asks you to develop a new marketing strategy for this start-up.
1. Describe the entrepreneurial journey of EcoSync (1500 words). In this account of EcoSync’s entrepreneurial journey, you need to describe various stages that the firm has gone through as it evolved into what it is today.
Use this framing to include analysis on product development, building the expert team, obtaining investment funding and other aspects that appear critical to the EcoSync story. Your analysis should use appropriate theory from recognised academic sources to help underpin your discussion.
Structure: ensure you take a developmental and historical perspective that identifies discrete stages running from initial idea(s) up to and including where EcoSync sits in the market today.
2. Draw up a business model for EcoSync containing a new value proposition for the firm’s products and services through which it can sustain and grow its business (1500 words).
This assignment element is a ‘real-world’ problem. This means that ideas developed by students for this assignment have the potential of being applied directly in the market place. Additionally, the learning involved will be attractive to prospective employers. A ‘value proposition’ refers to some innovative quality or feature in a product or service that adds value in some manner to make a company or product attractive to customers.
EcoSync are looking for fresh thinking and want to go back to basics to understand their new target audience, to know what the ‘pain points’ and trigger factors are for this audience, and to find out how to adjust their value proposition, their go-to-market strategy including branding, marketing, and customer acquisition strategy in order to gain traction in the marketplace. Use the Business Model Canvas template to help you undertake this task.
Some basic questions that the strategy can answer include:
What is the new value proposition and what is innovative about it?
How unique is this proposition? Are there similar offerings available on the market?
Who is the target customer?
What customer need does the product/service meet?
Why is the product/service better than comparable alternatives?
What are the competitive advantages of the new value proposition? Why cannot a competitor simply copy them?
How does the product/service reach the customer?
What strategy should the firm follow to acquire new customers?
What is the profile of the potential customer?