Sustainable Mobility: Use transport in more efficient ways saving both money and carbon
April 28, 2011 Leave a comment
Sustainable Mobility: Use transport in more efficient ways saving both money and carbon.
Carbon Voyage gets some help from Rolls Royce
February 5, 2011 1 Comment
Through our link with Heropreneurs, we have recently become recipients of a grant from Rolls – Royce to assist us in building our business; we think it is really great that a start up focused on reducing the environmental impact of transport has been able to get this from a large company renowned for its work in the aerospace industry . We are also planning a trip out to their facility in Bristol to find out a bit more about their sustainability strategies and particularly look at some of the work they are doing with gas turbine engines to reduce their impact on the environment.
Speech at the inaugural Heropreneurs Dinner
February 3, 2011 Leave a comment
Last night, I attended the inaugural dinner for Heropreneurs, a new charity established to help service leavers start up their own businesses. It was attended by the Minister for Veterans Affairs and a range of ex-military people who are all very successful business people in their own right. The following is the text of the speech I delivered - I did not completely stick to script, but it is broadly the same in content and theme:
The Right Honourable Under Secretary of State, ladies and gentlemen, my name is James Swanston and I run Carbon Voyage, a start up and an investment for Heropreneurs.
I thought it would be useful to set the scene by providing some background to my business and then discussing those areas in which Heropreneurs and indeed government can add value.
Transport is responsible for almost a quarter of all carbon emissions. Most commercial road transport is empty 30% of the time and 84% of all commuter journeys in cars only have single occupants.
My business was set up to address this by making transport more efficient, cutting cost, carbon and congestion.
To do this, we built a software application that tries to make best use of transport – sharing vehicles, filling empty return journeys and finding the right mode of travel; we initially developed this around passenger travel and are now working on a freight version of our software which is already attracting significant interest in the UK and elsewhere.
We compliment this with an advisory service to help major organizations in developing and implementing strategies to manage transport needs.
I negotiated our first deal, a research collaboration with Tesco and the University of Manchester almost a year ago whilst on leave from Afghanistan, and key customers now include Aegis Group plc and more recently, a major public sector organisation; pending successful funding from the Technology Strategy Board later this month, the organisations we anticipate we will be working with will include a range of very large public and private sector organisations. Our research work with the University of Manchester continues and we are regularly approached to assist research efforts at other universities.
We are very positive about opportunities in the current economic climate as our service can help the government deliver services whilst meeting significant cost and carbon reduction targets with minimal upfront investment. However, this will require some new thinking in the government and a willingness for innovation – some of our models point to wastage of 20% and higher in the way transport is used across all levels of government and the MoD is certainly not exempt from this. In the experience of many innovative companies, government is poorly set up to support fresh thinking when it comes to new ways of doing business.
While this all paints a rather impressive picture, or at least we feel rather positive, it is not all plain sailing and this is where an organisation such as Heropreneurs can provide a great deal of value. Most of us have served in highly demanding war zones where our decisions, often made in a split second, are about life or death, so in some respects, the pressures of a start up do not quite compare. Our ‘do more with less’ lifestyle certainly translates very nicely into bootstrapping a start up, but help is still needed.
Mentoring is perhaps the most important thing – having links into experience can help entrepreneurs open doors and negotiate the obstacles and pitfalls of running a business. Links with big business are also key – via Heropreneurs, one FTSE 100 company is now investing money and time in supporting some of our efforts, and our link with them will only serve to add to our credibility as a new enterprise.
Support with business services – PR, legal, accounting – can take a massive amount of pressure off a start up and remove major costs from the early stages of the life of a business.
Access to funding for start ups, rather dear to my heart at the moment, is fundamentally broken at the moment, although I would be keen to note that funding should not be seen as an automatic right for anyone with a cunning plan. Tech businesses in particular do not require amounts that sit within the normal model of angel and venture investing; banks do not lend money and do their best to ignore enterprise finance initiatives. Ten or twenty thousand pounds can go an amazing distance in start ups these days, and in some respects, that is the kind of funding levels that are important – if I look at our business, the help that an amount such as that would provide to us would be amazing, particularly to help ease pressure on our working capital needs, but it is hardly a funding level that would excite most angel investors or VCs.
Trying to break into public sector procurement is somewhat akin to a sisyphean task; at minimum, it would be great for Heropreneurs to help start ups build partnerships with the right organisations to be competitive for bids – a need that we have right now as we look to compete for a major public sector organisation to manage their transport better – which we know we can do if we can jump through the procurement hurdles. Perhaps a more exciting idea though would be for Heropreneurs to work with the MoD to establish a suitable test bed or incubator for public sector opportunities – smart, entrepreneurial service leavers know exactly where the opportunities are to do things better, far more than defence civilians or the standard set of major consulting firms that cost a lot of money, and it would also enable some retention of the corporate knowledge that is exiting the uniformed services at alarming rates.
In closing, I would like to add my thanks to those of Peter’s for coming tonight. The space in which Heropreneurs exists links very well with the Government’s aspirations for big society as well as the continuing need to foster enterprise and innovation in the United Kingdom. It can also reinforce the very positive light in which those who serve in uniform are seen.
Effective mentoring, funding, business support, and assisting with public sector procurement opportunities are all fantastic ways for Heropreneurs to enable service leavers to excel in building new businesses.
I hope I have been able to plant some ideas about where you can support Heropreneurs; most service leavers are without the right networks and opportunities to achieve their potential, so having this mechanism to assist entrepreneurial service leavers is an aspiration worth of support.
Beating the rise in fuel costs
January 1, 2011 Leave a comment
Ushering in the new year was not just a set of parties and festivities but also increases in public transport costs and fuel (via the fuel duty and the increase in VAT) – The Scotsman referred to it as New Year fuel duty rise leaves lorry drivers facing ‘a £95m hangover’ and The Independent also mentioned that the situation could get worse due to a potential spike in the price of oil – and the price of fuel has gone up 20% in the last two years as highlighted in this BBC article. In The Independent article, the Freight Transport Association was quoted as saying that these price rises would see lorry drivers paying an additional £1,200 per year in fuel costs. The Daily Mail suggests that motorists will need to pay an additional £255 per year to run their cars.
Obviously this is concerning for those who drive and those that provide transport services; however this also needs to be seen in the context of the massive inefficiencies across the transport sector. One of the terrible statistics is single occupancy in vehicles which averages 60% (and 84% for commuting) which is crazy. Price rises could be ‘combated’ by increasing charges to customers, which then just serves to compound the inflationary pressures created by the VAT and fuel duty increases. The better solution is to look at where efficiencies can be generated. Given the scale of inefficiencies within the industry (30-40% empty running/ dead mileage for taxis and road freight), the real answer is to address this which can happen very easily, whether it be driver training, more efficient fuel products or technology solutions that help better match up demand and supply, which is obviously at the core of what our technology does. Continued price rises will also start to change the equation around the cost-benefit of switching to hybrid technology and coupled with the announcement about subsidies to purchase electric vehicles will potentially see some interesting developments in this direction. This is of course accompanied by significant capital expenditure so really the short term solution and the easy wins are around driver training and technology.
I appreciate the concerns that motoring associations and industry commentators have, but the reality is that the transport industry is immensely inefficient and has a massive environmental impact – the way to deal with this is to seriously implement more sustainable ways of travelling and nothing else is good enough.
Some good videos
December 18, 2010 Leave a comment
I thought I would add a couple of cool videos that I’ve seen!!! Both are linked in to The Prince’s Trust Accounting For Sustainability – all with some interesting characters in them. The first involves a number of business leaders including Sir Richard Branson, Deborah Meaden and Theo Paphitis and the second features Stephen Fry. The first of the videos again highlights the point made in my last post about how sustainability can indeed assist in reducing the cost of doing business, and should be embedded into day to day process rather than operate as something that sounds nice in a CSR policy.
I saw another horrendous video yesterday on Mother Jones where they’ve uncovered an excerpt from some utterly ridiculous ultra-right wing religious fanatics claiming that environmentalism is part of some satanic world order – aside from dismissing the link between fossil fuel usage and climate change, I think that they perhaps miss the point in the Bible about being custodians of the earth – which we are all quite bad at!
An opportunity being missed – Government spending cuts and inefficiencies
December 14, 2010 1 Comment
In the last day or so, there have been a number of articles about spending cuts in the NHS, Defence and local government in the UK – one article by the Guardian was entitled No Credible Plan for £20 bn NHS savings, warns MPs and in small print “Target would require ‘unprecedented’ efficiency gains to maintain quality of care, says health select committee”. The Telegraph on the other hand wrote an article entitled MoD ‘wasting £ billion a year‘ – and a cursory glance of news sites has plenty of articles about the recently announced reduction in local government budgets.
These massive inefficiencies are hardly new news nor has been the news about budget reductions. What is sad though is that there is now a tremendous opportunity to look at how sustainability and cleantech can actually help deal with this. There is a great chance to demonstrate how efficiencies can be achieved through more sustainable services and products but I sometimes wonder if the message is getting through. And sadly with the public sector, the methods for procurement are so bad that there is very little opportunity for innovation or solutions from start up businesses. In our limited experience in trying to get through procurement, every single tender asks for services that were around five years ago and barely reflect technological change, or provide the opportunity for new market entrants to provide solutions (if for no other reason than they have not been around for three years).
It is a disappointing situation – like us, I am sure that there are many other start up businesses that can provide the solutions needed to help the public sector meet its cost reduction targets without diminishing the underlying service needs – but there is very little chance of that happening until there is a radical rethink about public sector procurement. It may sound logical, but perhaps the answer is a government-sponsored incubator of sorts that allows start up, innovative solutions to be piloted in suitable government locations…
Eco2Transport
November 18, 2010 1 Comment
This week, we exhibited at Eco2Transport along with a number of other companies in the transport and cleantech space. As to be expected, there were many very innovative companies there. One of the most interesting pieces of information to come out of the whole event was during a panel discussion led by Richard Kemp-Harper who is the Lead Technologist Transport and Energy from the Technology Strategy Board. Zac from Carbon Diem mentioned that there were relatively new UK Government guidelines about sustainability reporting – and the key bit is that business travel is included. The full document can be downloaded here.
We were able to also give two presentations on the roles of technology and behaviour change in helping organisations establish successful sustainable transport schemes.
Carbon Voyage meets Peter Jones
July 29, 2010 1 Comment
On the 22nd of July, Carbon Voyage was one of six finalists out of around 3,000 entrants in the Enterprise Business Challenge, a competition to pitch to Peter Jones of Dragons’ Den fame.
James Swanston with Peter Jones at the Enterprise Business Challenge
In the week preceding, I went from someone who had never really watched Dragons’ Den to someone who has now pretty much watched every episode in existence. Unfortunately we didn’t win, but it was still a great day (the winner was Funky Lunch which is a great idea to get kids to eat more healthy food)
It was a good day, not just in terms of getting some more pitching experience, but also to meet some of the other finalists and hear about what they are up to.
In other news, we’re working on a really exciting project at the moment which I am hoping will launch later this year up north. There is a very cool article in the National Geographic that is sort of an aspiration what we would like to achieve called ‘A Day with Less Driving’ – check it out!
The Launch of Tesco Carbon Voyage
June 16, 2010 1 Comment
We are launching a ride sharing service called Tesco Carbon Voyage this week in partnership with Tesco and the University of Manchester’s Sustainable Consumption Institute (SCI). The service will be operating as a twelve week trial at three of Tesco’s big stores in North West London; if it proves successful, it may be extended. To visit the site, click here. The service will be offered to Tesco Clubcard holders in three Tesco Extra stores in North West London.
This is a really important activity; 84% of all passenger car trips in the United Kingdom only have one occupant according to DfT figures, so any opportunity to increase vehicle occupancy can have a impact on reducing carbon emissions, congestion as well as cost. The service we provide will be great in being able to get a baseline of the impact of customer travel to and from these stores and then identify potential financial and environmental savings.
What we are trying to do here is firstly understand travel patterns to and from supermarkets and then provide Tesco customers with a safe and convenient way to share their trips to and from their stores. The customers of the service will be able to book via phone, text or online. We will capture all the financial and environmental data so customers can find out how much they are saving through the ride-sharing scheme.
At the end of the trial, the SCI will also interview several hundred participants to get a detailed understanding of their views to such a service – what is a good enough incentive to get people to share, what barriers are there and so on. Something that is unique here is that not only are people being surveyed about their travel patterns, but we have the opportunity to see what they actually do. The SCI has also written a short information piece on this trial here.
As a start up, this is a tremendous opportunity to deploy a service on a very large scale and demonstrate the value of what we have to offer, and we’re really pleased to have been selected by these organisations to help them deliver this service.
