One of the best ways to find a problem is just by looking at improving an old and outdated method.

That’s just what Jake Loosaraian did when he went on a tour of a nuclear power plant in his college years here at Grove City College. While on this tour he found out that this particular plant had frequent shutdowns due to maintenance precautions, especially on the boilers. He found out that this type of shutdown was very common in the field and in other industries that used similar boilers. He was even more shocked when he learned that to check for possible breaches, the companies had personnel repel down with notepads and inspect that way. An hour of this slow inspection downtime costs the individual plants over $1 million.

So, he decided to do something about it. Loosarain, with the help of a couple of other classmates, designed and made a robot that could analyze the facilities and collect the data safely without decreasing the company’s bottom line so much. This was tested in the one plant he visited in college and ended up saving them $10-20 million. So, he decided to scale up and see if any other companies would be interested in this approach. And they did. Eventually, Gecko Robotics would have four different types of inspection robots with different types of applications but all with the same goal in mind; preserve human life and save the bottom line.

Even though it is one of the primary methods of innovation, replacing something is often overlooked because of how commonplace our age-old methods are. Loosaraian saw a problem that seems obvious today and created a 0-1 product out of it. This gave them total control of the market and some great financial backing relatively quickly. Gecko Robotics now has multiple big-name sponsors and even more competition. The company is doing well for itself today but to keep control of the market they will have to make some last-mover innovations that keep them ahead of the pack.