Drinking Inside the Box

Note: This is the 6th article in the “Why Johnny Can’t Innovate” series.

Last week, a customer told me one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever heard.

My client could be just about anyone in the Fortune 500. Most companies in that club are venerable institutions that have weathered industrial, economic, and demographic revolutions for many years. A typical skill of a Fortune 500 company is an ability to observe and cautiously adapt to their customers’ needs. For decades (and in not so infrequent cases, for over 100 years), that skill has served Fortune 500 companies, their customers, and shareholders, very well.

Before we dine on my client’s insightful morsel, I need to set the table.

We do not live in 20th century, though I’m seeing more and more evidence that many companies are wishing, and planning as if they, and their customers did. Long-lived companies (of any size) know that in order to thrive, an understanding of market dynamics (past, present, and future) is essential.

Any market consists of only two basic roles: a buyer, and a seller. Sellers are usually manufacturers that have identified one or more needs that their product or service can deliver. Buyers are likely customers of sellers, and have the surprisingly synergistic relationship to sellers that they usually need what the sellers provide.

Great and enduring companies are those that embrace a continual understanding of these two roles. Yet, this concept is one that manufacturers are forgetting with increasing predictability. Frequently, in the pursuit of new revenues beyond their current product or service pipelines, companies adopt the amazingly bad business strategy of, “If we build it, they will come”. All too often, this is a failing strategy. It is a strategy that is focused primarily on the company’s core competencies, and not nearly enough on the needs of potential customers.

In order for companies to thrive, especially when severe and protracted economic disruptions are clearly visible on the horizon, companies must literally innovate, or die. Innovation cannot be limited to the products and services a company makes. Innovation must be rigorously applied to new business strategies, and to the identification (not just the development) of new markets.

The table is now set, but perhaps I should offer you an aperitif to whet your appetite a bit further.

Innovation methodologies and tools, sadly, are rarely used at most companies to their full potential. The immediacy of quarterly earnings often damns R&D and other innovation activities to product cost reduction or process optimization. (For the truly damned, defect mitigation is sometimes the order of the day if customer complaints and/or warranty costs are the major components hitting both top and bottom line growth.)

Methodologies such as Lean, Six Sigma, and DFSS are used to drive efficiencies into existing products, which serve existing markets. Such methods produce measurable benefits to cost containment or boosts in productivity, but seldom is the game changed.

High-value innovation is often (and mistakenly) relegated to strategic activity. A select few with even more select calendars will, on special occasions, be given leave to ascend their ivory towers. The company’s anointed few are charged to ponder and pontificate on ideas that can yield insights into new product designs and new markets that the future might bring. I had dinner recently with a group of such innovation apostles.

And now, our feast can begin.

The discussion over dinner was on the eve of a workshop that would apply innovation methodologies and tools to the identification of new markets. My client’s once valuable products and processes that had endured for more than half a century were now little more than commodities. Within their core market segments, my client's return on their own innovation had been diminishing rapidly, especially during the recent economic (near) death spiral.

During the evening, we discussed several means by which any product or service (and their underlying technologies) could be deconstructed into key functional benefits. Through application of specific research questions (applied both through innovation methodology and software), we could then find intersections between a technology’s benefits and the needs such technologies would address. Using this approach, correlations between functions and needs would likely surface in demographics and markets that had previously been completely outside of my client’s consideration. The workshop, and subsequent applications thereof would be examples of classic, “out of the box” thinking, with one exception: The research and innovation methods would be facilitated through automation, and generate many ideas in a predictably short space of time, with increasing degrees of relevance.

My client told me that this was exactly what they needed to hear. I would soon discover, however, that it was also something they would be unwilling to practice.

It was, in fact, the onset of a common innovation killer that I've seen over the years.

My client was suffering from a classic onset of Comfort Food Poisoning, which I’ll talk about in the 7th installment of "Why Johnny Can’t Innovate".


Stay Hungry.

Channel Searching

Yesterday marked the end of an era, as the last day of analog television broadcasts in the United States came to a close. After 12:30pm, the VHF and UHF airwaves that carried the early pops and clicks from Sarnoff’s labs at RCA, JFK’s fateful ride through Dallas and Neal Armstrong’s ghostly image from another world (as well as decades of mind-numbing entertainment) once again fell silent, to the relief of tens of Radio Astronomers. Indeed, somewhere out in the cosmos, alien civilizations might observe in their distant futures, a momentary 80-year stream of our analog TV transmissions. We’ll appear for a brief time as a non-Planckian energy source with an exceptionally high energy density in the VHF/UHF bands. It’s certainly something they will have not likely seen before, and we may never see again.



The transition to digital television hasn’t been easy. It is estimated that there are still 2 or 3 million households in the United States (most in remote locations) that have not converted to the new digital standard. The delay has been in part is due to understandable resistance to changes that are being forced upon individuals, at their own expense.

Sometimes, change is inevitable. We may have perfectly valid reasons for objecting to change that is thrust upon us, especially when such change causes us harm or sacrifice. Unfortunately, there are times when all we gain by taking the moral high ground against change is to be the first to be struck down by lightening.

I’m seeing a lot of businesses pitch tents on Mt. Moral these days.

The great recession in which the global economy finds itself, is something for which few business planned. Certainly there was little or no consideration given of its inevitability or impacts back in 2006, even though the signs of the terrible economic storm on the horizon were painfully obvious. My own customers (and in my experience the vast majority of businesses) have been focused squarely on the moment. As the recession has taken hold, its manifestation has changed from the “crazy talk” of a few to becoming the number one threat impacting every sector of the economy. Today, companies are examining every asset they have under a microscope, and no longer think of a recession as remote possibility. It has hit, and hit hard.

Currently, I’m seeing expected and predictable actions (and reactions) of corporate managers who feel as if they were caught flat-footed by the recession. Across many industries, the same stories are being played out: Redundancies are being hastily eliminated. Operations are being streamlined and/or reduced in any way that doesn’t involve new financial investment. Product innovation is being drastically re-examined and often curtailed. The latter story is of particular interest to me, for obvious reasons of course, but also because I’m seeing two product innovation camps form as I travel around the country.

The first camp is in denial, and is fighting for as much space on the summit of Mt. Moral as possible, even to the extent of pushing others down the hill. Companies in this camp proclaim “no one could have seen this coming” and are bemoaning the unfairness of the recession that has decimated their revenues. Costs have been cut, and product innovation is on hold. For these companies, their strategy, expressed with nervous pride under the flag of hope, is that the problem will just go away if ignored long enough, and the markets (with their past customers) will return to their pre-recession buying habits as if nothing happened. Once revenues return to the levels of yesteryear, resources for product innovation will be freed up, and product pipelines will be filled once more.

Important safety tip: Hope is a four-letter word.

The other camp is far more interesting. Companies in this camp are also facing significant revenue declines in their existing markets, but instead of reacting and retracting, they’re planning and preparing to move. This spring I’ve been helping companies who are seeing their billions-per-year revenues shrink by as much as thirty-five percent in less than twelve months. In this camp, no one is crying foul. Instead what they’re doing is looking for creative ways to strengthen and diversify their product portfolios. In a recessionary period, new monies for R&D are still very difficult to come by. A viable alternative to traditional product innovation is to examine benefits that existing products and technologies bring to current markets. By researching the question, “Who else needs the benefits of my product or technology?”, it is possible to discover new applications and channels for existing products that may not have been previously considered. Such channels can often represent entirely new product lifecycles for otherwise might have been a maturing product in a previously saturated market. It is a proactive strategy which companies in this camp are beginning to pursue aggressively. More often than not, the results are placing these companies in a far more competitive position for that day when the recession does finally end.

Unlike the crowded refugee camps on the high ground, this growing camp is making claims to large tracts of cheap, abandoned beachfront property for the next economic cycle. Ironically, the crowd on the hill will have poor reception in these new channels.



That gives me an idea. Maybe I can sell them my old rabbit ears?

Happy Bankruptcy Wishes from The Devil and Norma Jean

June 1st has once again made its way onto my desk calendar.

Unlike dates of significance that are associated with a holiday or moment of societal reflection, a birthday is more personal. This year's transit, for me, has proven to be a day of unique confluences that I can honestly say, as a younger man, I would not have expected.

As of this hour, twenty-two people have come together in one place from different parts of my past to wish me well today. I've heard from high-school acquaintances from the early 1980's, past and current professional colleagues, clients, service providers, friends and relatives. All of them have written on my Facebook wall today, in a sort of virtual birthday party that started on the 29th and will probably linger into mid-week. I've long-since stopped being awe-struck by internet technologies - there hasn't really been a disruptive innovation in this space for years. However, the disruptive application of internet technologies continues to weave social tapestries that had no counterparts just 5 years ago, let alone twenty or more.

Every day on the calendar contains footnotes to famous events, births and deaths. Certainly the news of today will add another footnote that will be of far greater impact than I could expect to have. At 8:00am this morning, General Motors, which at one point employed over 500,000 skilled workers and was the manufacturing engine of the United States, became a ward of the state and filed for bankruptcy. Unfortunately, this was an event that was foreseeable, especially in the last few months. Yet in that time, the American taxpayer has been subjected to a fleecing of epic proportions to support GM and its denial of the inevitable. The price tag for such hubris, funded predominantly for political expedience, has already put taxpayers on the hook for $100 billion dollars and is likely to pass $150 billion as the true depth of the liabilities are uncovered.

Do you know what $150 billion could have bought today? The Apollo program, which ran from 1961 to 1972 and put humanity on the moon (creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and spurring technology and manufacturing innovation on a scale we haven't seen since from any other single event) cost $25.4 billion in 1969 dollars. In 2009 inflation-adjusted dollars, that comes out to just under $148 billion. President Obama says we may ask ourselves, "Where's my Moon?". Apparently, it's been hacked to bits and locked in the trunks of our fathers' Oldsmobiles, which the mob has already collected and placed into outsourced car crushers.

Thanks, Barry. Keep the Change.

Maybe you could spend it on a birthday party of your own, as a predecessor of yours once did.




Marilyn Monroe was born on June 1st.

Still, among the well-wishes and gifts that did not come with a certificate of perpetual wealth transfer from the IRS, was an extremely practical birthday reflection / greeting from Satan (via my goddaughter). It was a short, to the point, pull-no-punches message studded with the realities of what will befall people on any given birthday.




This guy's good. If only we had such clarity and sobering honesty in our country's fiscal and monetary policies (to say nothing of the budget). He clearly seems to have the capacity to show us exactly the road we're on and the Inferno to which it leads.

Dante was born on June 1st. I wonder if Virgil ever threw him a party?

Resolution For 2009: Lose Your Job

The end of a year is when we tend to reflect on the recent past and make some of our most ambitious plans for year ahead. Paths not taken are re-explored. Lists are drawn up. Priorities are set. Alcohol is consumed. (Note: Proper sequencing of the aforementioned has a direct impact on the results.)

Unfortunately, the beginning of the New Year is often a time of disappointment. We frequently fall short of our lofty and hastily assembled goals, sometimes before the dawn’s ugly light of January 2nd (but I digress).

By many accounts, 2008 is a year that many of us would like to forget. The world (and certainly the United States) is rapidly moving past economic recession into a depression (not just another great depression, but an awesome depression). If you haven’t been paying attention to the banking and economic crises of the past 12-18 months because “it doesn’t affect me”, you’re in for a nasty wake-up call in 2009. Unless you’re independently self-sufficient in everything that you do, the dependencies you have on your job, your community, and your ecosystems are going to be shaken to their core.

At the end of 2008, you’re in one of two camps: Those who still have a job, and those who joined the growing ranks of the unemployed. I want to address the second group first. You have my deepest empathy. I’ve been where you are several times in my careers, and it is one of the most debilitating and terrifying challenges life can throw at you in a free society. In 2009, I’m going to share with you some thoughts and resources that hopefully can aid you in your hunt for new employment.

The remainder of this article directed at the first group, but it is by no means exclusive to you.

2008 has given you a tremendous gift – the gift of working on borrowed time. You don’t have an excuse for being satisfied with the status quo of doing your same job every day. Doing only what your management asks, hitting only the metrics they give you, being satisfied just with satisfactory performance are sure ways to go unnoticed by people you infrequently speak with – those who ultimately decide whether or not you stay employed with your current company.

We’re all human beings (yes, lawyers too) and we all share a similar response mechanism to perceived or real threats – fight or flight. In economic downturns, traditionally (bad) advice to employment threats is to keep your nose to the grindstone (ouch!) and just keep doing your job. That strategy is particularly bad in today’s downturn, both for you, and your company. Hunkering down and hoping that the bean counters won’t notice you not only efficiently gets you into the layoff queue - it enables your company to make spectacularly horrid mistakes by severing talent and skills they never knew they had, and ironically will hire someone else to do the exact same job when the tides turn.

Corporate myopia doesn’t discriminate between large and small businesses. You may be the best widget maker or most effective manager in your department, but that doesn’t matter when your company’s business plans become obsolete overnight. When that happens in 2009 (if it hasn’t already) you’ll face a real possibility of being declared redundant, unless you’ve anticipated this situation and taken steps to prevent it.

The secret to effective career management (as well as to staying gainfully employed) is to lose your job. No, I don’t mean quit, or become unemployed. I mean, lose the idea of your individual identity in a company as being just a cog in the machine. If you objectify what you do as nothing but a job, i.e. tasks to check off on a list, you will only be seen as an object in times of poor business performance. Business, by definition, is impersonal. If you personally take responsibility for the growth of your performance, and its relationship to the growth of your company, you will create paths and opportunities for both yourself, and your company which will have directly measurable impacts to revenue.

I learned this very real lesson with my current employer in my third month on the job (to date, I’ve worked here for over six years). Soon after I was hired, new management was brought in by the board of directors to take the company in a completely different direction. All assets (products, resources) were examined closely as the new business plans were drawn up. The CEO interviewed all employees one by one, and when he came to me, we had a short interview, and gave me a very honest appraisal.

“Frankly, I don’t know what you do.”

I had just landed this job after having previously been out of work for nine months. To say my CEO’s appraisal of me didn’t sit well was an understatement. But, I took this as an opportunity to demonstrate to him, and myself, just what I did do. Failure was already built in, so anything that I did and demonstrated on some level didn’t matter, because I had already accepted that I had lost my job – the paychecks that kept coming were simply borrowed time.

What I lost then, and continue to lose to this day, you should as well - especially in the uncharted economic waters ahead.

• Lose the idea that your employment is secure, even if you’re a top performer and your management has told you so. Expect the unexpected, like losing your employment tomorrow. Yes, this is a death experience. Die, mourn, pick up the pieces, and move on.
  
  
• Lose the notion that life is fair, or that rules can’t change in a heartbeat. Whining is not a path to promotion (except in national politics).
  
  
• Lose the idea that anyone else has your interests at heart more than you do.
  
  
• Lose the crutch of hope. As Jim Cramer says, “Hope is not an investment strategy”. If your action plan for 2009 is to hope that things get better…hoo boy.
  
  
• Lose the idea that problems that affect your day to day tasks are someone else’s problems to worry about, even if they are. A problem that affects your performance is an opportunity for you to excel and help get that problem solved. Never stop looking for ways to improve yourself or your company.
  
  
• Lose the fear that comes with facing a loss of your livelihood. This is hard, but it is an essential skill to master before you need it. Fear engenders paralysis, and paralysis means someone else will have more control of your performance, and your fate.
  
  
• Lose the complacency about being measured by metrics that you haven’t had a direct hand in shaping or discussing with your management. If you don't know how you're being measured, you risk working towards irrelevant goals. If you do know how you're being measured, and the metrics are inadequate, work with your management to change the metrics. The process will benefit both you, and your company.
  
  
• Lose ignoring your potential as a brand. Excellence speaks for itself, and often it carries a name. Focus on continually excelling beyond your limits, and you’ll develop personal and professional brand value.
  
  
• Lose the idea that you can’t make a direct impact to your company’s products, services, and revenue.
  
  
• Lose any lack of passion about what you do, even if you’re doing “what ya gotta do”. If you’re just punching a clock so that in 30 years you won’t have to, you’ve got much bigger problems than I can address here.

If you can’t see yourself doing any of what I’ve outlined with your current employer, then all I can give you is a consolation prize – the knowledge that you need to move on. In this environment, that’s difficult, but you should still take the ideas I’ve outlined as benefits that you would expect to be able to bring to a new employer, and be prepared to speak to them as you interview.

Above all, as you make your resolutions for 2009, make one additional (sober) resolution:


Don’t Panic.

$25 Billion - A Simple Business Plan

This is one of those moments where life and art have a strange intersection.

The recent plea for $25 billion of taxpayer-backed loans by the CEOs of the big three auto firms has Congress asking a very practical question:

"What plan do you have for spending $25 billion?"

Back in March of 1939, General Motors' Department of Public Relations commissioned the Jam Handy Organization to produce a short film on the subject of macroeconomics.

Maybe GM's future is in widgets?

Park To The Future

Note: This is the third and final article in a special daily series being published this week on the topic of automotive innovation.

In my previous two articles (How Your Car Might Re-Invent More Than Just The Auto Industry, A Car of Tomorrow, Driven Through TRIZ), I outlined conditions under which systemic change occurs. Evolutionary constraints define opportunities for radical innovation that leads to shifts in industry - in some cases creating new industries. The automotive industry finds itself awash in evolutionary constraints, not just with its products, but with its customers and the environments in which their products exist. I presented some thoughts using influences of an innovation methodology known as TRIZ, and left you with a parting thought, which on the surface, probably sounded insane:

"An auto industry of tomorrow will need to build new cars that people will want to buy, not because they will have to drive their cars, but because they will want to park them."

In my final article in this special series, I want to expand on some innovations for this most unusual car of tomorrow I’ve proposed, and give away some ideas to any entrepreneur who has the vision, tolerance for risk, and business savvy to take these ideas and run with (or from) them.

Unlike the Norman Bel Geddes vision of the world of tomorrow, any utilitarianism suggested here is goaled to benefit the individual (who hopefully has just a hint of an entrepreneurial spirit). Done right, the potential for societal benefits are significant.

One assumption that I will make, looking out into the future of the next 1-5 years is this: People (at least in the United States) will still work at jobs that are primarily located away from their homes, and a majority of them will require vehicular transportation to get to their jobs or to public commuting options.

This means that for large pockets of the population, there will be predictable occurrences of large numbers of cars (existing and new) that park at work, park at shopping centers, and part at their homes. So why not develop innovations for the cars of today and tomorrow that leverage this predictable occurrence? Setting aside for the moment the entrepreneurial risk required to productize such innovations, I challenge automakers and anyone else who needs to innovate for a living to imagine just a few possible benefits of intentionally parked cars:

• Many parking lots will be in range of commercial and metropolitan high-speed wireless networks. Create and enable car-friendly mobile computing platforms (similar to a BlackBerry or iPhone) that can be accessed by an owner with nothing more a web browser on their desktop for any one of a number of purposes (selling computing cycles to computing clusters, downloading movies, music, news or other digital content for later use, to name just a few examples). By creating a mobile platform that can exist outside of the workplace, not only can more digital products and services be delivered, and on a timelier basis, but countless hours of covertly wasted productivity in commercial IT networks and desktop platforms can be saved.
  
  
• In several, large parts of the United States, cars are parked in parking lots that are subjected to extreme periods of heat, cold, and sunlight. In the case of long-exposure to sunlight, innovate high-efficiency solar charging systems that are integrated into sky-facing panels of a car with standardized, easy access ports in the car’s interior for recharging low-duty power systems such as simple batteries or common electronics.
  
  
• In the case of long-exposure to sub-freezing cold, create compact materials that can act as efficient and useful thermal masses (heat sinks). Imagine bringing a small supply of cold-packs that will be frozen by the end of the work day (or overnight if you don’t park your car in a garage). Even in the coldest of cities, people use electricity to operate refrigerators and freezers. I challenge automakers to collaborate with the kitchen appliance industry to create new cold pack technology (new materials and efficient form factors) that are designed explicitly to lessen electrical loading by optimizing refrigeration duty cycles. (A person comes home from work, sticks their cold-cells in the refrigerator, and a few days later, takes the cold-cells back to work be “recharged” in the parking lot.) What would the savings to a person’s electrical bill be? Perhaps $5 or $10 a month? What would that mean across 1,000,000 refrigerators in daily operation? What impact would that have on the environment?
  
  
• Parking lots full of car trunks represent hundreds or thousands of mobile lockers per lot. Create services that can leverage this resource to the benefit of individuals, commerce, and the environment. Innovate a securable, shared locking mechanism and trust model that enables a car’s owner to grant one-time access to a service provider at a pre-determined point in time. Imagine driving to work with a bag of newspapers or a bin of cans to recycle one morning. A recycle service, with a map of all cars that have brought materials for recycling that day to the parking lot can show up, remove just the recyclable materials from all cars that have registered their pickup request, and as appropriate, charge or credit the owner, depending on the business model. Think of a similar service scenario, but in reverse, for delivery of safe goods along a driver’s home commute. A driver registers with a major shipping service that their trunk is available for hire to take and drop off a secured, safe-package to a house along their home-bound commute. The shipper has a map that matches all deliveries on a given day, with all the secure trunks that match driver and route availability. Then the shipper makes one trip with many packages to the one parking lot. Packages are distributed to the appropriate cars, and the packages are delivered the same day by individuals who are already making the same trip home that they would have been making regardless of the extra stop. Imagine how much gasoline, ethanol, hydrogen, and entropy can be saved by leveraging simple efficiencies in large, predictable populations. I believe there are many business models that could recover startup costs and profitably leverage a predictable parking lot.

These are but a handful of ideas, I can think of dozens more. My point in doing so, and giving them away, is to set a small example. Sure, I’d love to know that any of these ideas was the spark that was used by a young (or older) risk-taker who went forth and transformed how we view and use the modern automobile. (Author’s note: In case of future windfalls or transformational profits derived from anything you’ve read in my articles, it’s ok to send me a small, landscape-profiled thank-you note which starts with the words “Payable To”.) However, it is far more important that you realize that innovation, at anytime, is a worthy investment, and in a recessionary or even a depressed economy, is essential.

Whether or not you’re an auto executive from Detroit, take the ideas I’ve given you, and do something, with or because of them. Think beyond your current business model, and your industry. Move beyond how things used to be, because the only guarantee I can give you about tomorrow, is that the world will change. Learn how to recognize the need for systemic change, and learn the tools, methods, and skills to be the agents of change. Don’t become the victims of resisting it.

If you succeed, and if my articles of the last few days play any part in your success, then my reward will be beyond measure. For you see, whatever systemic benefits you bring to the world as a result, my goddaughter and her generation will inherit them.

A Car Of Tomorrow, Driven Through TRIZ

Note: This is the second in a special series of daily articles being published this week on the topic of automotive innovation.

Regular readers of my articles will know that among the many innovation methodologies one can choose to spark creative problem solving, Genrich Altschuller's Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (aka TRIZ, which is the more recognized name and Russian acronym) is one of my favorites.

In yesterday's article, I outlined the basic elements of systemic change. Evolution, whether organic or artificial in origin, creates constraints that can shape and drive radical innovation. TRIZ is a particularly effective innovation methodology when facing serious systemic constraints. In applying TRIZ methodology and principles to the current problems facing the automobile industry, I am quickly drawn to several design considerations:

• It is ill-advised to redesign a car as a system, without considering the larger super-system in which the car operates.
  
• It is ill-advised to redesign a car as a system, without considering that the car itself is comprised of sub-systems that may perform multiple functions, independent of the primary goals of the car itself (which is, of course, transportation).
  
• When designing around constraints, often the most powerful design breakthroughs come from finding advantage in disadvantage.

Ok, admittedly what I’ve said so far is really the stuff of fortune-cookies. Wonderful and sugary visions wrapped in vanilla abstracts, but where is the application? What do super-systems and design constraints have to do with the 2009 model year?

Let’s look at today’s car in a little more detail.

A car’s primary job is to transport one or more people. An important secondary job is to transport a bit of cargo at the same time. Cars do their work in cycles. They move, and they stop. They get parked for periods of time, sometimes predictably, especially where work commutes are involved. Cities, roads, garages, and parking lots are but some of the supersystems in which cars operate.

Cars are also compilations of multiple sub-systems. Some sub-systems are obvious (fuel, electrical, transmission) while others are more subtle (roof, doors, locks, etc). There is as much if not more detail paid to the design and functionality of automobile sub-systems as there is to the automobile as a single system.

Why is all this important? In considering the many constraints impacting the automotive industry and its customers, economic constraints certainly are near or at the top of the list. When using TRIZ to predict possible evolutions of the car, the driver, and the super-systems in which they will exist, I can look to one of the seventy-six 'standard solutions' that Altschuller claimed were reflected in natural and technical system evolution. One standard in particular suggests the periodic distribution of actions to eliminate conflicts.

Thinking about what a car needs to do for a driver, and what a driver's needs might be outside of a car, I am led to one conclusion. The car of tomorrow needs to be a platform that has value when it is used for driving, but has more value when it is parked.

The corresponding business model is then very simple to describe, but it is also one that if uttered by Rick Wagoner tomorrow, would most certainly cost him his job unless he has a very innovation-savvy board of directors.

"An auto industry of tomorrow will need to build new cars that people will want to buy, not because they will have to drive their cars, but because they will want to park them."

Tomorrow's article: Park To The Future

How Your Car Might Re-Invent More Than Just The Auto Industry

Note: This is the first in a special series of daily articles being published this week on the topic of automotive innovation.

A few months ago, I reflected upon how the American taxpayer might see themselves in the mirror in the not too distant future as a result of the current global economic crisis. Today, I wish things looked even that good.

As the crisis has expanded (well beyond the financial sector), the word “unprecedented” has become a potentially lethal weapon at many business schools:

“Ok guys, every time Dylan or Maria says ‘unprecedented’, everyone take a drink – two if it’s Kudlow or Haines.”

Author’s note: Never do this.

Global industries have endured severe credit interruptions at the same time that product demand by their customers has fallen off of a proverbial cliff. One industry in exceptional distress that has seen generations of growth and value erased is the automobile industry. Today, in late 2008, we are literally facing a collapse of one or all of the “big three” American automakers - Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler.

Since its 100-year peak in April of 2000, the stock price of GM has fallen over 96% and is threatening to dip significantly below $3. Before April of 2000, you have to go back in GM’s history to about 1939 to have seen it trade at this (split-adjusted) level.

Ironically, 1939 was the year that GM was looking 20 years into the future, sponsoring the famous “Futurama” exhibition at the New York World’s Fair. GM of today can take a lesson from their exhibit of long ago, and recognize that the world of tomorrow cannot be reached by living in the past.

The future is born out of evolution and innovation. Evolutions of systems (natural, technical or social) are driven by organic and artificial influences. Regardless of who or what controls such influences, evolutions often create the very challenges and constraints that shape sudden leaps to next-generation systems. Innovations are often born out of constraints. In the cases of evolutionary constraints, the innovations that arise are revolutionary, and are often key to driving rapid, systemic transformation.

In his recent New York Times Op-Ed piece, “How to Fix a Flat”, Pulitzer Prize winning author Thomas Friedman, discussed his dismay with the automobile industry. The near demise of the industry, in his view, is a direct result of a multi-year lack of effective innovation. He opposes a public sector bailout of the industry ($25 billion is being considered just for GM) if the funds are used solely to preserve current business models. In an appearance on CNBC in which he discussed his article, Friedman said that the best kind of person to bring forward (and even fund) to fix the auto industry is one who “lives, breathes and thinks innovation every minute of the day”.

I facilitate innovation for a living. Every day I work with clients from different industries and help them create ideas in pursuit of revolutionary product design using software and methodologies. I see the constraints my clients face in their designs every day. I’ve seen first-hand how the deteriorating economic environment will impact my clients in the next 12 months, and I’ve told them why accelerating their innovation in 2009 should be a top priority, and how to go about doing it.

I’ve been thinking about the current problems facing the automobile industry and anyone who owns or drives a car. Over the next few days, I’d like to openly share some thoughts and ideas I’ve had for the benefit of anyone who has the entrepreneurial ability to leverage them.

Before you ask me why I’m giving away these ideas, I’ll have to ask you to bear with me and wait until the end of the final article in this series. I promise I’ll make my motives clear.

Tomorrow’s article: A Car Of Tomorrow, Driven Through TRIZ

Buy Jupiter! (And Beyond the Infinite)

This week has been one of those rare periods in time when many frames of reference overlap. I don’t often comment here on issues concerning economics, global markets or financial management.

Today is an exception.

Unless you’ve been clinically dead for tax purposes, the imminent meltdown of the global financial system has been in your face, on your mind, and very close to bringing your way of life to a sudden and irrevocable stop. (Think your profitable small company could make payroll if all bank transactions were suddenly halted for 90 days?) I doubt there are many people around (let alone who might be reading this) who were alive as adults during the 1929 crash and the events leading up to and after it, and could put this week’s crisis in perspective. For the rest of us, go read Manias, Panics and Crashes. (Ideally, you should have read this two years ago.)

On this day when AIG has been suspended on the precipice of bankruptcy by a tenuous Federal bailout, and we’re just beginning to understand how close the world has come to a global financial seizure, questions on how we got here (and where we have yet to go) are only now being considered by the general population. I find myself looking at Jupiter.

As an innovation practitioner, I see futures – all futures that my clients consider as they move to achieve their goals in new product and business development. This week is particularly apropos as I am working with one of the premier rocket design companies in the world, who support engine systems ranging from the Space Shuttle, to a return to the Moon, to interplanetary transports. This was the stuff of hard and pulpy science-fiction back in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The kings of that era were authors like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke (both of whom I’ve been fortunate to meet and talk with when they were alive). They didn’t limit their writings to rockets and ray-guns – they often looked at the complex (and often darker) sides of human nature.

Buy Jupiter! is an Asimov short story about future humans channeling creative greed by outsmarting natives in overseas emerging markets through option derivatives trading. (The story really involves selling Jupiter’s atmosphere to aliens for energy who then try to use the atmosphere for advertising, only to find the humans outsmarted them by selling options to other atmospheres to competing aliens.) Over half a century ago, Asimov pretty much called the future we are living today – people in their own greed are willing to come up with more and more creative (and poorly understood) financial vehicles to try and capitalize on other people’s greed – and all is well until the system falls apart. Arthur C. Clarke is of course most known for 2001: A Space Odyssey, and since I’m willing to bet more of you know Stanley Kubrick’s interpretation of it (i.e. the film) and possibly haven’t read the book in a while, I’ll stick to what you probably know as the last act of the film, 'Jupiter, and Beyond the Infinite'. Astronaut David Bowman is seen leaving Discovery in an EVA pod, heading towards the mysterious monolith in orbit around Jupiter, and crosses what can only be thought of as a transitional and transformational gateway. We see glimpses of Bowman as he is hurtled through the dizzying gateway, pained with expressions of absolute, stark terror.



This same expression has been spotted on many faces at the NYSE, NASDAQ and other trading floors around the world every day this week. You (and as of next week, the American taxpayer) may soon be seeing this face in the mirror.

We are rapidly and irrevocably going through a period of great change that is completely out of control. We haven’t yet emerged on the other side of the gateway, and the trip ahead will be dark, dizzying and absolutely terrifying. The next few days and weeks will dramatically affect how we re-define wealth, money, and qualities of life for decades to come.

Somewhere in my library should be a story from not so long ago that tells me how this will all work out. Very likely, it was written by Philip K. Dick.