- Title
- Permo-Drive : Governance under innovation
- Creator
- Courvisanos, Jerry; Hipwell, Angel
- Date
- 2012
- Type
- Text; Book chapter
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/160432
- Identifier
- vital:12180
- Identifier
- ISBN:978-0-9864597-6-4
- Abstract
- Permo-Drive Technologies Limited is a small public company, based on the north-east coast of Australia, that made the first functional Regenerative Drive System (RDS) for motor vehicles. The RDS technology captures energy expended in braking the vehicle, and then applying this energy to assist moving the vehicle when required from stoppages and on steep inclines. Permo-Drive created this intelligent hybrid hydraulic system for vehicles leading to savings in fuel and therefore reductions in carbon emissions and other pollutants. RDS is a significant ecologically sustainable technology which as at 2011 has become a mainstream ecological technology to the extent that the Toyota Prius model has been promoted with three energy sources; petrol, electricity and regenerative drive. In 'The Weekend Australian Magazine' on the 5th July 2003, an article on Permo-Drive called "Oily Rages to Riches", lauded the innovation in this technology and predicted an exciting future with the US Army at that time keen to retrofit all its trucks with the RDS technology. As of 2011, Permo-Drive is still struggling to make a mark in the business world, having gone through many trials of survival related to plethora of governance issues including legal (patents and bankruptcy), management, marketing, financial, regional development, and public innovation support. What went wrong? This is the question that this study aims to explain, using a specific technology commercialisation of innovation model set up by V.K. Jolly in the book 'Commercializing New Technologies: Getting from mind to market' (1997). From a two-man private innovation company, Permo-Drive went on to be a small private company with a large shareholding list of many "mums and dads" who bought into the idea with $3 million of shares at shopping malls, clubs and schools on the north coast of NSW. Then Permo-Drive morphed into a broad-based public stock company with an international managment team. The road to realising a commercial return on this innovation has been very bumpy with an uncertain end; a process that has also had significant implications for governance of the company. More than anything, it reveals just how tenous and uncertain the innovation process can be.
- Publisher
- RossiSmith Academic Publications Ltd
- Relation
- Learning through cases : Contemporary challenges in corporate governance Chapter 10 p. 101-117
- Rights
- Copyright © 2012 RossiSmith Academic Publications Ltd.
- Rights
- This metadata is freely available under a CCO license
- Subject
- Permo-Drive; Governance; Innovation
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