Business Model
Figure 1: Business model for S-POP
Business Plan
Water pollution is a global problem. It affects marine life, coastal reefs, and also spreads water-borne diseases. This pollution has been caused by several reasons like industrial dumping of chemicals, sedimentation of soil, dumping of plastic, etc. Testing for the chemicals in the water, to prevent harmful long-term effects, is very expensive. Not only does the price play a major role, detection of pollutants is usually done through a chemical process which is very time consuming.
Our product, S-POP, brings solutions to the aforementioned problems in the market. S-POP uses environmental friendly biological procedures to detect pollutants in the water. This eventually prevents dangerous pollutants/chemicals from reaching the water. As S-POP is meant to be modular and uses biological procedures, the tests can be done on site. This not only saves time but also other financial costs like transport and laboratory fees. The key metric of S-POP is electricity, since the activity of our product can be measured through electricity.
The unfair advantages of our product are that there are several other water pollutant detection projects present along with ours. Also, there are multiple detection procedures that different projects are based on. Even if these features are already present in the market, the unique value proposition (UVP) of S-POP is that it uses MFC & microorganisms to detect different kind of chemicals in site, which is cost-effective and fast. We believe our UVP would stand out the product in the already saturated market.
The main customer targets are the governmental agencies, environmental agencies, diagnostic centers of water pollution, and most importantly industries that use water pollution prevention systems. In other words, industries and plants that output chemicals into the water that they are responsible for testing for and cleaning up. These customers are planned to be target through various environmental conferences, where everyone would be like-minded and have similar concerns to which we bring the solution to. Also through collaboration with companies we can bring our product to the market.
As our product idea is unique, innovative and novel we plan to file patent for this. Thus our main expenditure for the upcoming years is filing of intellectual property in different parts of the world. We mainly want to focus on Europe, USA and China. Three different regions would require three different patent applications which would cost us a fortune. Apart from this, there are lab expenditures which also includes rent and salary of employees. Another main cost would be prototyping the product.
The revenue strategy is based on licensing our technology to similar manufacturing companies. We plan to make S-POP an "ingredient brand", meaning anyone using our technology or idea has to provide us with per sale commission. This also falls under the category of development and implementation fee charges. Apart from all the above, another main source of revenue would be through product sales.