There are a lot of good ideas roaming around this world, and most of them never see the light of day. That’s unfortunate for us all. But organizations working to shine a light on them need to be lit up themselves. A good example is Eco Innovation Group, Inc. (OTCMKTS:ECOX), a company that discovers, develops, and commercializes promising inventions with the dual capacity for commercial and ecological success.
This is a particularly interesting company because it trades so cheaply today, and at a time when so much money is starting to seek out interesting ideas that have the capacity to move the needle for the market as well as for planet Earth.
And it’s important to point out right off the bat that this isn’t some fly-by-night penny stock making scant progress on its narrative. ECOX has established a number of projects and deals that make good on its fundamental promise already, with more apparently in the works and ready to surface as new tangible catalysts. In the small-cap and micro-cap world, progress is everything because none of these companies get the benefit of the doubt, quite rightly.
First, we want to outline the ECOX promise here and then take a look at a specific example by which the company is delivering on it.
The Promise
In its Shareholder Letter from last month, Eco Innovation Group, Inc. (OTCMKTS:ECOX) outlined its core premise and the ways in which it will seek to succeed given that outline.
Note some key excerpts:
“As you are likely aware, Eco Innovation Group pivoted in late February of this year and adopted a new vision and corporate strategy. We are now one hundred percent committed to creating the most successful eco-oriented innovation incubator platform in the world. We built a strong pipeline of products in development working with our initial inventors and innovators, and we have many more leads in progress that should foster an exciting second half of 2020, as that pipeline broadens and we near commercial-stage product launches.”
“Our product licensing agreements provide us with the rights to leverage existing product development and intellectual property, and then commercialize, market, and sell these products. Our success depends on the quality of ideas we cultivate in our discovery process, our development and execution incubating products and our go-to-market strategy… As we get this model off the ground this summer, we have already made strong strides toward commercializing several powerful products now in our incubation pipeline.”
Those paragraphs outline the basic idea. The other point made in the letter that gets to the heart of what’s possible here suggests a tie-in with the ESG movement:
“Our model has other advantages as well. We are aligned with the emerging Environmental, Social, and Governance (“ESG”) companies currently in vogue in the capital markets. ESG is generally understood to refer to investment capital being driven by interests in environmental, social, and governance concerns in conjunction with financial factors in the investment decision-making process. Morgan Stanley researchers believe ESG investing may drive as much as $57 trillion in capital flows over the next ten years, and we hope to participate in this developing opportunity. There are also potential alternative non-dilutive funding sources increasingly being made available to ESG companies, such as grants and special tax credits, that may apply to some our products in the future… None of this represents an incentive to work less hard to deliver our shareholder value. It does mean that we will remain true to our vision of making a positive ecological impact through innovation along the way. We consider our role as a socially responsible investment opportunity to be both an asset and a responsibility.”
In other words, this is company that is seeking to leverage social impact funding to develop products capable of being simultaneously successful in both commercial and ecological terms.
The PoolCooled™ Win
We are going to state right off the bat that this is just our opinion: PoolCooled™ is cool. Seriously.
The company’s first major success according to the blueprint laid out above is this dynamic and potentially revolutionary product that leverages proprietary technology to cool a home or building by taking cool water from an existing swimming pool and looping it through the existing air conditioning system to boost efficiency on a per-unit power consumption basis.
In a recent release, Eco Innovation Group, Inc. (OTCMKTS:ECOX) laid out the results of the company’s first official test of the PoolCooled™ system. And the results support a best-case outcome potential for this product.
According to the release, the initial test was performed under controlled conditions. The test compared the power usage involved in cleaning a swimming pool and cooling a home equipped with a three-ton central AC system, where the pool was immediately adjacent to the home. The test showed that, over a specified period, the separate tasks of operating the pool filtration system and the home AC system, independently and with traditional systems in place, required 4,300 watts of power. By comparison, based on the company’s statements in the release, both tasks were accomplished equally well by the PoolCooled™ system, which consumed only 1100 watts of power over the same time period.”
In other words, it saved about 3,200 watts in the controlled comparison, side by side. That amounts to nearly 75% in energy savings. That should translate into savings for the energy consumer as well as the planet. This is particularly compelling because it suggests that “going green” can be both cheaper and better for the environment.
“We continue to be extremely excited about the commercial and ecological prospects of the PoolCooled™ system and the promise it holds as an ideal example of what ECOX stands for as a company,” remarked Julia Otey-Raudes, CEO of ECOX. “Based on these results, this technology promises to simultaneously reduce costs and the carbon footprint for any pool-adjacent structure with AC needs. This has obvious residential benefits for homeowners and homebuilders. But, for businesses like hotel chains, those benefits come at scale and promise to offer competitive value in marketing targeted toward ecologically conscious customers. This first test strongly confirms our hopes and allows us to push forward with our commercial launch process.”
