The Naturally Boulder Days 2008 conference was this week. The tour on Wednesday afternoon was incredibly interesting. It included visiting the CU Chancellor's home to see its role in the Xcel Smart Grid city project, a tour of Udi's Bakery and a trip to a gourmet, organic chocolatier manufacturing facility, Seth Ellis. The tired cliché regarding Boulder and organic is just that, a tired cliché. Boulder is the global epicenter of innovation in the natural and organic market spaces. I would like to point out, actually shout out, that this industry is not a collection of cottage businesses. Many of the businesses we visited on the tour, and who were present at the two day conference event, employ hundreds of people, generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue each year.
Udi's Bakery, which has grown into adjacent markets represents not just an artisan loaf of bread at the grocery store but also its own restaurant, four delis, a catering business, granola, gluten free baked goods and support for boxed meals for purchase for one of the airlines. Udi's started off as a family run business in 1994 growing to over 240 employees today. The company uses a local miller for its flour, owns its distribution fleet and provides 6000 loaves of fresh baked bread every day to businesses across Colorado. The firm practices its philosophy of corporate social responsibility in all of its business activities. The company knows its strengths and has identified its core competencies. It knows what markets make sense to expand in to, and has achieved its growth organically.
Udi's Bakery, while a small business, expects to continue to grow and expand its business. Technology is used at a cursory level by the bakery. As the bakery and its integrated, adjacent businesses continue to grow, they will have opportunities to leverage technology further to increase revenues, profits and its customer base.
Xcel Energy and its Boulder City Smart Grid project is going to be getting a lot of ink in this space. This is a pilot project for Xcel Energy, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (a part of the US Department of Energy), National Institute of Standards and Technology, and numerous other partners. The goal of the project is to leverage technology to improve power flows across a city. For detailed information click here http://birdcam.xcelenergy.com/sgc/index.html .
We toured the CU Chancellor's home, which is part of the Smart Grid project, to see how the home was retrofitted. The Smart Grid project takes Cisco Systems' smart home to the extreme, expanding it across the entire city of Boulder. When the kinks are worked out of the pilot program and it begins to get implemented in cities across the country, we can all expect to see the demand for IP addressing and security to explode.
Stay tuned to this space. The next posts will be exclusively on the technology behind City Smart Grid and my conversations with representatives from Xcel Energy.
Have a terrific Halloween weekend!
Martha Young is the founder of Nova Amber, LLC, a business consulting firm specializing in virtual business strategies. She has worked in the technology sector for more than 14 years, working and consulting with Fortune 500 companies including Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel Corporation and Lockheed Martin. She is a widely recognized industry expert on hosted, managed and outsourced services, and virtual business strategy.
This blog is a business strategy discussion aimed at firms seeking to build and retain a competitive advantage by taking advantage of virtual business processes. It covers the topic of organizational readiness for virtual business. We explore many of the components of determining organizational readiness including executive leadership readiness, IT readiness, IT governance and how to develop and execute a readiness plan. We will examine the common hurdles to readiness and how to overcome them.
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