空中客车冒险通过当地

John（Jay）Rogers Jr.，Ceo和Choenix的初创本地电机的首席执行官和联合创始人，于2004年坐在沙漠中，作为他在伊拉克最后一次巡回演出的海军陆战队员，当时他决定回家并创造一个新型汽车公司 - 一个建造一种新型车辆的汽车公司。“我正在考虑我们拉出地面的多少油，”他说。“我想，如果我们可以以不同的方式制造汽车，我们就可以摆脱石油习惯。我们可以通过我喜欢的东西改变世界，即车辆。“

Rogers developed a vision of doing everything about cars differently. He didn’t want to concentrate solely on the power train, a frequent focus of innovative efforts. Instead, he wanted to remake the sensors, the materials, safety, comfort, usability — all of it. He decided he would start by rethinking how vehicles get made in the first place.

从全新方向接近制造的愿望是使本地电机成为当地电机，启动罗杰斯将于2007年找到，这是一个完美的适合作为空中客车集团企业的第一个投资组合公司，新的风险投资臂荷兰航空航天堤防。空中客车集团首席执行官托马斯特迎宾has committed $150 million to the venture arm’s first fund and installed Tim Dombrowski, formerly a partner at $4.2 billion Silicon Valley VC firmAndreessen Horowitz, as its head. Enders’s charge to Dombrowski: Find the technologies and start-ups that are poised to disrupt the aerospace industry.

“研究和开发组织的发生是什么，通常是现有产品的逐步创新，”Dombrowski说，他在设计工程和计划管理中度过了大部分职业生涯，专注于商用飞机，防御，卫星和无人驾驶飞行器节目在波音，北罗姆曼，斯科尔斯基和联合技术。“真正的中断可能不会发生在那里;这就是[空中客车]正在做的事情。“

Dombrowski专注于早期增长投资，并补充说他也在调查天使和种子投资。“那个[早期的阶段]将是我们想要做的一小部分，但是有太多有趣的东西让他们传递给他们，”他说。Although Dombrowski won’t comment specifically on how much the firm plans to invest in each company or how many investments its first fund intends to make, he says he wants to make sure it has enough reserves set aside for a possible follow-on round in each of the start-ups in which it invests.

The Airbus Ventures chief first heard about Local Motors while doing research around advanced manufacturing, an area that includes 3-D printing. “Local Motors kept popping up,” Dombrowski says. As he learned more about the company, he found he was most interested in its embrace of crowdsourced engineering to solve seemingly unsolvable problems. A “recovering engineer,” as he describes himself, the former HP Software and Opsware executive says he believes the mentality Local Motors models — loosening the tight, secretive grip on intellectual property and soliciting feedback from engineers outside of the company in the interest of bringing good ideas to market quickly — could be game-changing. Given that Airbus Group CEO Enders is eager to speed up the process by which his 136,000-employee organization brings new innovations to market, the investment makes sense.

Local Motors’ Rogers first heard about crowdsourcing through a company called Threadless, which sells T-shirts printed with designs submitted by independent artists. The model made him curious: What would happen if a vehicle company posed a challenge to engineers sitting at home on their computers — say, how to create a 3-D-printed automobile — and crowdsourced possible solutions? Having worked for a medical device manufacturer in China briefly before joining the Marines, Rogers also wondered why the automotive industry remained so steeped in mass manufacturing, when new technologies, like 3-D printing, made possible distributed microfactories (specialized facilities focused on prototyping and producing a small batch of products at a rapid pace).

Rogers created Local Motors as a platform that would incorporate both crowdsourcing and distributed microfactories — thereby, he hoped, courting disruption within sea, land and air vehicles, as well as appliances. Local Motors has partnered with General Electric Co., for example, to source ideas online from engineers to improve upon existing GE products and prototype new ideas. The most popular innovations will be built and tested in a新的Microfactory.。本地电机还与空中客车建立了商业伙伴关系 - 在与风险投资分开的交易中 - 帮助使用相同的过程开发航空航天公司的无人机。

The investment from Airbus Ventures will likely be used by Local Motors to develop a new microfactory in Germany and laboratories that bring together engineers to collaborate both online and in person. Dombrowski says his team — which includes himself and two other investment partners —will play a close advisory role with Local Motors, and board seats are still being discussed.

As he searches for Airbus Ventures’ next investment, Dombrowski is both bowed and energized by the scope of his mandate, which includes any technology or system that could prove accretive to any of the products within Airbus Group. Commercial aircraft is a particular area of interest — given that it represents 70 percent of Airbus’s revenue — but military aircraft, helicopters, launch vehicles, rockets, unmanned air vehicles (or drones) and satellites are also promising. Technology that touches on any of those areas could include engines of all kinds, avionics, aircraft software systems, sensors to feed into theInternet of Things, analytics to analyze those data, materials like aluminum composites and even in-flight entertainment. Dombrowski says he’s happy to have been granted full independence from Airbus, which means he can make investment decisions quickly, without reporting to any higher-ups within the company.

“开始创业没有更多的激动人心的时间，”Dombrowski说，注意到私人市场正在软化。“这对我们来说会很好。”

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