Don’t tell my mum

Onzo, led by Joel Hagan, is aiming to change your personal relationship with energy for good.

Whether you’re into social ideas, behaviour change, people-friendly data visualisation, product service system design, cleantech or starting up, Onzo is an excellent case study.

Without further ado, here are his answers to some questions I posed him:

1. Using layman’s terms, what is Onzo?

Onzo is a company that designs domestic energy management systems. Onzo puts people in charge of their energy use. “Utility” has become synonymous with universal, invisible and boring. But these days, with the cost of energy being high and now we appreciate the harm we’ve being doing to the planet by burning fossil fuels, our individual relationship with energy needs to change. We all need to see it, understand it, and get help with it.

2. What makes Onzo different from other personal energy meters, e.g. the Wattson?

What’s personal about them? Onzo’s energy display is genuinely personal – it adapts to your home. Look, there are so many differences between Onzo and others that a list would be boring. So I’ll pick on a few things that I think are illustrative:

· The display is part of a product service system that includes a personalized web service

· The system is designed to help you change behaviour not just present you with meaningless data

· You won’t need to change the batteries in the sensor

· The display is designed to go anywhere in your home

I could go on. My point overall is that we have looked at every aspect of the system from ordering to disposal and designed it to be easy, engaging, and useful. Many other products never even make it out of the box.

3. Why is access to better information so important for transforming our behaviour regarding energy usage?

Feedback loops. If I do something and I perceive its consequence in a timely fashion then I have one of the key building blocks for behaviour change. Imagine a car without a dashboard – however would you drive it? How many speeding tickets, over-heated engines, indicators left on, would there be? There’s more to changing behaviour than timely feedback of course – for example, people need to be disposed to change before they make a change (whether they are compelled, cajoled, or enlightened). We’ve taken a lot of time to understand human behavior and considered comparable challenges to inform our design.

4. Onzo has been dubbed the ‘iPod of Cleantech’. What are your plans for turning Onzo into a household name?

I’m glad someone said that about us – it would be altogether more hollow if we’d said it about ourselves! But I think it’s a really useful way to think about Onzo. The main parallels are that we have a product service system, place a lot of value on aesthetic design, and aspire to take significant market share globally. However, there’s no evidence so far that there is a retail market for home energy management in any form, so our initial focus is on distribution through utility companies as they want to use our offering to attract and retain customers and improve their service to them. As the investment by Scottish & Southern Energy in Onzo (alongside Sigma Capital) and the £7m order they have placed gives them exclusivity among UK energy suppliers for Onzo’s products and services we will be launching a retail play here during 2009 to enable everyone to get their hands on Onzo stuff.

5. How important are social media tools for the launch and growth of Onzo?

The power of community is one of the tools that improves engagement, another foundation for behaviour change. Look what Nike Plus has done for running. So we’re keen to harness the power of community, although it would probably not be right for us to try to be a community ourselves. Which leads into the answer to the next question:

6. What role do you see Onzo playing in existing online communities? For example, Pachube?

As I say, Onzo doesn’t expect to be a community site in its own right. On the other hand we expect to enable people to share their information with others through communities that they are already part of. So I guess we’re philosophically aligned with Pachube in allowing people to share environmental data. This functionality lies down the road for us so we haven’t decided yet exactly how we’ll do this. But one of the things that we’d like to do is open up the Onzo system so that people can find their own ways of improving its usefulness. It would be arrogant to assume that we have thought of everything and simply wrong-headed to believe that “mass-tailoring” is much more than an unachievable goal.

7. Following a career in law and management consultancy, how did you end up running a cleantech start-up?

How was it that the man whose pocket was picked on Oliver Twist’s first sortie was his dead father’s best friend and executor? Preposterous plots make good stories. The answer actually is brand and marketing guru John Grant. I worked with him when I was Director of Strategy & Planning at Arthur Andersen and enjoyed his intellect, his provocative thinking, and his communication skills. We kept in touch over the years. He and I found ourselves in a meeting together kicking the tyres of someone’s business plan as a favour. I mentioned that I was looking around for an entrepreneurial opportunity to build and run. And a few days later, John emailed me to say that he knew a few guys who had done some great work in energy visualisation and wanted to turn it into a commercial proposition. I met them – More Associates; they had met Lightweight Medical, a young and successful sustainable product design house, in The Hub workspace in Angel; they had raised £250k of funding from the DTI. I developed a business plan and we set up Onzo; we raised £250k in seed funding; and we went on to raise a further £2m and rolled most of More Associates and all of Lightweight Medical’s resources into Onzo. I’m very happy doing what I’m doing. I love to hire teams, to build and adapt structures, to do something meaningful, and to be in charge!

8. What’s been your greatest success with Onzo so far?

Office accommodation – I’ve found two great central London office spaces in succession where the rent is low. Still being in business after more than 2 years. No, seriously, it’s a hard question to answer. Basically it’s been hiring great people. Onzo is a high quality team through and through. And so Onzo is their success as much as it is mine.

9. What’s been your biggest mistake?

Fixing a contract price in £sterling in early 2008 when our manufacture costs are in US$ and not hedging against currency movements. In all other respects, a global downturn is good for Onzo so I shouldn’t grumble..

10. What other brands do you admire, within the cleantech sector and beyond? Why?

I admire Gridpoint, the smart grid pioneer, for the fact it has raised so much money with a great vision. Outside cleantech there are a dozen businesses I particularly admire for various different reasons. The top 5 would be:

· Microsoft, for a successful strategy based on pervasive software. People like to hate Microsoft but I don’t think they get the credit they deserve.

· Apple, for its design achievements, brand loyalty and general ability to wow.

· Google, for the effectiveness of its core function and for some amazing tools like Google Earth.

· Tesco, for pulling ahead of a previously undifferentiated pack in large part by using its knowledge of customers to great effect.

· Topshop, for the democratization of fashion.

11. Finally, what would a successful 2009 look like for Onzo?

Global orders secured. Successful further fund raise. Three times as many people as today (30×3=90). And most important of all, for the first time in history people feeling in charge of their energy use thanks to Onzo’s products and services.

8/2/2009 Update: Really happy to report that this Q & A prompted the guys at Nudge blog to invite Joel to write a guest post.