Entreprenuership

The GVF Living Laboratory Entrepreneurship Model

GVF Living Laboratory is intentionally purposed to be an entrepreneurial environment where innovation, creativity, and value-creation are transcendent, and ultimately translated into successful businesses. Our goal is to grow entrepreneurs who create, align and execute on worthwhile visions. Discovery-driven research, innovation, technology-commercialization and value-creation are paramount. They are driven to result in concept development, strategic alliances, symbiotic partnerships, lasting joint ventures. Licensing and patents of intellectual property, spin-outs, and a continuing stream of start-ups and technology-based ventures are the inevitable outcomes of such a holistic approach to the GVF Living Laboratory Entrepreneurial Model.

To the entrepreneur, while “failure” can be momentarily enervating...and prompt an "emotional backlash;" successful entrepreneurs see failure as only another stepping stone to ultimate success. It is not a person or a way of life...it's merely an event. Risk is inherent in entrepreneurship and free-enterprise...but risk must be identified, quantified and managed.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

Winston Churchill

STRATEGIC CAPITAL

GVF Living Laboratory principals have a wealth of experience in the formulation of capital and what is often referred to as “financial engineering.” This revolves around what we call "captive capital," which is to say it is capital that is both strategic and readily accessible. The GVF Living Laboratory capital facility comprises organic capital, closely-connected, high-net worth individuals, and, only if necessary, institutional capital. The five-tiered multi-capital funding facility (please see graphic below) provides: early stage seed capital; venture capital; mezzanine level funding; debt convertible to equity and senior level debt.

Though counterintuitive, there is no scarcity of discretionary capital. In fact, the globe is awash in generally uncommitted capital that, in many cases, is not even yielding the true rate of inflation; meaning that inert, stagnant capital is inexorably diminishing its inherent principle base. In the continental U.S. alone, there is $4 trillion, overseas U.S. capital of $2.5 trillion and globally over $30 trillion on the sidelines in uncommitted capital. The reality is there are vastly more capital resources available than there are solid, legitimate, high-quality investment opportunities.

So, the challenge for the entrepreneur is to make sure there is a) a well-crafted and articulated vision for the enterprise b) a disciplined plan of execution and accountability and c) a commitment and realistic probability for meeting performance milestones. As these milestones are achieved, multi-tier investment capital flows into a successful venture.

TECHNOLOGY ENABLERS

The common denominator for global-success in the 21st century is technology! Each of the sectors targeted for GVF Living Laboratory is expected to utilize disruptive technologies and innovation to optimize efficiency and prospects for success. What gets measured gets accomplished! While the specific tools of technology and innovation will vary from sector-to-sector, leading-edge platform technologies will transcend and pervade all of the research and innovation envisioned for GVF LL.

RESEARCH

It is the goal of GVF LL to populate the laboratory with many interdisciplinary groups that are teeming with life and boundless creativity as they work in the "beta period" of their lives, and do so while striving to surmount the challenges and setbacks they will invariably face. Most of the research and demonstration projects to be carried out at GVF LL are related directly to the 6 addressable markets utilizing unmanned and autonomous systems as the enabling platform.

EDUCATION

GVF Living Laboratory is dedicated in its commitment to provide a place where young people can learn and do with their hands and minds what is most challenging and rewarding to them as they seek to put what they have learned theoretically and intellectually into competency-based practice. With an assemblage of academic institutions working collaboratively with multiple private-sector companies and businesses (both large and small), the student can avail themselves of seasoned mentoring coupled with hands-on internships, all of which enhance the prospects of career-readiness for our state's young people and our country's future leaders.