iCan Bike Worldwide

iCan Bike Worldwide

Our goal to teach as many people with disabilities how to ride a conventional bicycle extends beyond the borders of the area we currently serve, the United States and Canada. However, logistical challenges posed by transporting a trailer filled with literally a ton of adapted bike equipment simply makes it cost prohibitive to offer our iCan Bike program outside our current service area.

With that said, we’ve received countless inquiries throughout the years from people and organizations in other countries wanting to host our iCan Bike program locally. Given the level of interest that we continue to receive regarding offering our iCan Bike program to people with disabilities outside our current service area, we’ve recently introduced our iCan Bike Worldwide initiative (“iCBW”).

Licensing Overview

iCBW involves us seeking to collaborate with a handful of foreign nonprofit organizations located outside of North America (“FNPO”s) who are interested in and have sufficient financial and scaling capacity to offer our bike program locally. This collaboration would involve us:

• • entering into a licensing agreement, for a one-time upfront licensing fee of USD $150,000, enabling the FNPO to utilize our intellectual property including:
    • engineering plans of our bicycle adaptations and accompanying rollers necessary for the FNPO to produce and assemble such bike equipment adaptations locally in their country
    • iCan Bike programming materials necessary to implement and administer the bike program locally to people with disabilities
  • asking that all ownership and costs associated with procurement, production and assembly of all bike equipment, including requisite adaptations, remain with the FNPO
  • providing a requisite level of consultation (via video conferencing and/or in-person, if requested) to the FNPO necessary to thoroughly understand the utilization of the adapted bike equipment and related iCan Bike programming materials
  • providing two weeks of in-person training at our iCan Bike camps (will require members of the FNPO to travel to the United States)
  • providing optional non-requisite consultation to the FNPO, to the extent warranted and requested, at very reasonable hourly bill rates
  • abiding by geographical restrictions on the number of such FNPO’s with whom we enter into such licensing agreements, with the primary goal of mitigating any and all overlap of geographical areas serviceable by each FNPO
  • requiring terms to prohibit dissemination of such detailed engineering plans and related iCan Bike programming materials to serve the best interest of all associated FNPOs

We realize such a licensing collaboration requires a substantial investment and will not appeal to, or even be possible for, many FNPOs. However, we are confident this licensing collaboration will appeal to a small number of FNPOs that are willing to serve a fairly large geographical areas such as Europe, Australia, Asia, South Africa, Russia and possibly South and/or Central America.

Licensing Feasibility

For some context on the human resources of our iCan Bike program, we have two (2) full time employees and then hire approximately 35 seasonal camp staff each year. Such seasonal camp staff typically work between 4 and 8 weeks for us each year. Most of our staff have full-time careers as teachers, graduate/doctoral students or those who otherwise have the flexibility to commit to limited seasonal work each year.

We serve all of the US and Canada. We do so with 15 fleets of bike equipment (each fleet has 26 bikes and related equipment) with two staff people assigned to each fleet who run each weeklong camp. Our 15 fleets can serve in the range of 115 to 130 bike camps each summer depending on the various camp proximities. Each weeklong camp serves up to 40 participants and our operating costs are funded by our fixed fee to each camp host of approximately USD $10,000.

Licensing Scalability

What’s important to understand is that our operating costs are directly correlated with the number of bike camps we serve. For a FNPO in the early stage of developing a bike program, it would make sense to initially invest in creating only one or two fleets of bike equipment (each fleet costs approximately USD $35,000 to produce).

As the number of camps serviced each year increases, the FNPO can invest in producing additional fleets of bike equipment. In other words, the investment to create each additional fleet will be recovered directly by the additional camp fees the FNPO would receive from each additional local camp host. In turn this would also fund the operating costs of each additional weeklong camp (e.g., staff compensation, travel, etc).

 

If you are affiliated with a FNPO and are interested in exploring if iCBW makes sense for your organization, please email jeff@icanshine.org for more details.