Polar Clean Turns to enFocus for Knowledge and Leadership in Submitting a Successful Grant Application

Sponsor Spotlight: Polar Clean LLC

Interview by Maxx Hamm, enFocus Innovation Fellow and project leader

Tell me a bit about the project and how you worked with enFocus

enFocus basically led and facilitated the application for our STTR grant proposal to the Air Force to develop an automated approach to our current service offering for cleaning the inner diameter of pipes and tubing in industrial settings. enFocus worked to hold us accountable to deadlines and organized our offering so that it met the needed requirements for the submission.

What impact has it created for your organization/community?

So, what it's done, is provide us a stimulus to quantify a lot of the ideas and value propositions in our eyes.  It has provided the type of information that we otherwise could have only speculated about. It has provided an avenue to perform more market research and pull all the details together much more solidly than we have in the past. Most importantly, I think it has energized our organization to see what opportunities are out there for us. And there are some very, very large opportunities out there that are worthy of a slow steady burn or even a fast steady burn to continue to push into these new waters with R&D type work and use R&D as a marketing strategy for growing our business.

What is the greatest value enFocus has delivered to you?

I think that even though we at Polar Clean had the concept in mind, and multiple ideas that can be developed, it was our collaboration with enFocus that brought everything together. Your expertise, the knowledge of the process, and the ability to efficiently, and in a very focused way, take the information that I have to get it all down and get it into the right format kept us on track. You worked to keep that process moving very efficiently and fast to meet the deadline. Without a doubt, had we not had your leadership, knowledge of the process, and project management skills, we could not have accomplished what we did.

How would you describe your future partnership/opportunities for collaboration?

To me it's wide open, I think I had a positive predisposition towards the organization just from what I had heard from others, but now after having this experience, I am definitely interested in working together.  The only limitation that I can see from my end is just that, as a smaller company, especially until we actually hit one of these grants, we have got limited resources so we can only go so fast. So, I've just got to make sure that I'm thoughtful about our resources and how they're being allocated. Now that we have hit one of these, it allows me to say to the rest of the organization see it's not just a pie in the sky. It’s real!

Learn more about enFocus's work with regional organizations in our next Sponsor Spotlight.