Fuel Cell Developer Adaptive Materials Is Michigan Success Story; Maybe Too Successful

we’ll see some spikes in that depending on what’s going on in the world. I think, long-term, they need to continue acquisition of fuel cells for unmanned aerial vehicles, fuel cells for robots. But they also need maintenance, they need training. So, it will be a very important line for us for a very long time.

We’re not projecting a dip in revenue, but we’re just not projecting huge growth in revenue. So we think that over the next five years we’ll be able to get to a sustainable business model with the military. And then what we would like to do in addition to that, in order to get our quality up and our economy to scale, we would also like to go after the commercial sector, which includes remote sensing and law enforcement, homeland security, all those kinds of things.

X: So, there’s still a lot of room for growth in military, not just in units sold, but also in training and maintenance.

MC: Yeah. Acquisition, maintenance and training. I think that one of the greatest things about a disruptive technology vs. just an improvement in existing technology, is that disruptive technology usually tends to pull in other scientists. There are probably some brilliant scientists who have developed some other innovative applications that we don’t even know about yet, that the military would love to get their hands on but they haven’t been able to commercialize it because they didn’t have the power. So, now AMI can give them the power that they need to grow their market as well. We’re already seeing a little bit of that on the applications side and some partnerships there evolving.

X: You’re not an early stage company anymore.

MC: No, we’re more like teenagers. We’re getting pimples and hitting puberty [laughs]. We have different needs. In a startup, you’re very worried about funding, you’re worried about hiring people. We’re 10 years into this and probably a little more jaded, a little more aggressive, but I definitely see that our needs have changed over 10 years. We’re in a different cycle than we were a few years ago. Our worries now

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Author: Howard Lovy

Howard Lovy is a veteran journalist who has focused primarily on technology, science and innovation during the past decade. In 2001, he helped launch Small Times Magazine, a nanotech publication based in Ann Arbor, MI, where he built the freelance team and worked closely with writers to set the tone and style for an emerging sector that had never before been covered from a business perspective. Lovy's work at Small Times, and on one of the first nanotechnology-themed blogs, helped him earn a reputation for making complex subjects understandable, interesting, and even entertaining for a broad audience. It also earned him the 2004 Prize in Communication from the Foresight Institute, a nanotech think tank. In his freelance work, Lovy covers nanotechnology in addition to technological innovation in Michigan with an emphasis on efforts to survive and retool in the state's post-automotive age. Lovy's work has appeared in many publications, including Wired News, Salon.com, the Wall Street Journal, The Detroit News, The Scientist, the Forbes/Wolfe Nanotech Report, Michigan Messenger, and the Ann Arbor Chronicle.