Letter from the President
We are continuing our transition from a research company to one that also emphasizes development. We have just changed our company name from “Eltron Research, Inc.” to “Eltron Research & Development, Inc.” to reflect the ongoing changes.
In addition, we have created a business development group and have hired Doug Jack to lead that effort. We have added a business developer and a marketer.
In order to move our technologies from research into commercial and technical development we need engineers to complement our scientists. To that end we have added 7 engineers with more coming soon. We have also added two more Ph.D.-level scientists.
I am very proud of our staff. They truly are the key to making all of our dreams come to life. They have responded very well to the new challenge of the focus on commercialization. We have increased the staff size by 18% and reduced employee turnover by more than 90%. We have implemented several new programs including flexible work hours, an educational refund policy and a 401(k) savings program.
A significant challenge for a small business like ours is funding, particularly for development work, most of which occurs after government funding has ended. Our traditional government contracting work does not provide any margin to move technologies towards commercialization. We are continuing to work with other companies to set up deals whereby the other company receives favorable terms or exclusive rights to use our technologies in return for funding the remaining development. There are several exciting developments close to fruition which I hope to share with you soon.
We have also taken on some contract R&D. Although we do not own the intellectual property in these contracts, they do generate cash flow that we are using to advance some of our existing technologies towards commercialization.
We have been developing a technology for many years that makes low concentration hydrogen peroxide directly from air and water on-site “on the fly”. This peroxide is ideal for replacing chlorine compounds in many water treating applications such as industrial and municipal wastewater treating, cooling towers, soil remediation etc. We have two prototypes which have performed very well in “real life” applications. Interest in this product has been steadily growing as a more environmentally friendly method for water treatment. Eltron Water Systems LLC is our new subsidiary which is moving the product from prototype to commercial manufacturing and marketing. I look forward to being able to tell you more about this and some of our other internally funded development work in my next letter. In the interim if you are interested you can view a brief on it on our website by clicking here.
We have not forsaken research for development. Within the past year we have started 26 new projects of which 17 were SBIR/STTR (government), 3 with private companies and 6 are internally-funded.
We have a ways to go before we reach our goal of being the best SBIR company in the country in terms of the number and quality of products we invent and get to the market but I believe we are headed in the right direction. If you have any comments or questions on our company, please give me a call at (303) 530-0263 x105 (I’d like to list my email address here but I think it would attract a bunch of spam…).
Paul Grimmer