5 - Identifying Opportunities in Sustainability II
5 - Identifying Opportunities in Sustainability II sxr133Lesson 5 Overview
Lesson 5 Overview mrs110Summary
In this Lesson, we will be spending our time learning some practical and tactical means by which we can understand "space." Understanding space and where peers and competitors function is a bedrock concept in terms of understanding opportunity and potential differentiation.
In my experience and observation, much time and effort is wasted in trying to create "synthetic innovation," whether a product, service, or campaign. What I specifically mean by "synthetic innovation" is a syndrome of which people struggle to create something in the ether, without meaningful stimuli or underlying rationale, attempting to alloy raw creativity and mental horsepower into something new. Ironically, it is the type of innovation on display when you ask a child to "invent something," and they mash together a few nearby concepts to create something new to the world. Perhaps "Unicorn toothpaste" or "Corgi saddles."
If you consider real, successful innovation in the sustainability space (or any space), they very commonly take the form of a stepwise and logical improvement on an existing concept. Even if that improvement is 'new to the world,' I would argue it is many times still anchored in some existing function or translating function from another domain. I challenge you to take the most innovative new service or product and reverse engineer it: The magical success of Uber becomes a 'decentralized taxi service with driver ratings,' and there were actually quite a few smaller iterations of that concept long before Uber. Airbnb is basically 'decentralized hotel service with host ratings' a la Uber for hotels, and so on.
So, with the goal of improving our 'tool set of innovation' during our time together in this course, this week we will spend time understanding the building blocks of differentiation. By understanding those building blocks and how they are combined, we can then rearrange the blocks and add meaningful innovation, as opposed to failing around to create differentiation around an effort of questionable value.
We could spend millions in advertising and marketing to cement your reputation as 'the world's foremost Corgi saddlery,' but you might be less than satisfied with the financial performance of that endeavor.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:
- frame the importance of "expanding from center" to create sustainability-driven innovation, strategic integration, and brand equity;
- articulate White, Gray, and Black space and how each can be of strategic interest;
- deconstruct sustainability strategies and Corporate Sustainability Reports into White, Gray, and Black areas for innovation;
- conduct research to gain detailed understandings of White, Gray, and Black spaces.
Lesson Roadmap
| To Read | Chapters 9 and 10 (Keeley, et al.) Documents and assets as noted/linked in the Lesson (optional) |
|---|---|
| To Do | Case Assignment: Sketching WGB spaces
|
Questions?
If you have any questions, please send them to my axj153@psu.edu Faculty email. I will check daily to respond. If your question is one that is relevant to the entire class, I may respond to the entire class rather than individually.
Value-Based Innovation and Sustainability
Value-Based Innovation and Sustainability ksc17Everything Begins From Center
From the most logical product line extensions to the most out there innovation, one should be able to connect it directly back to the overall Mission of the organization, its core competencies, and what it stands for... the organization's center, if you will.
In practice, organizations, especially those with strong brands and connections with customers, tend to underestimate how much license customers will give to these more out there innovations and extensions of offerings. Why? Because many organizations aren't actually well acquainted with how customers perceive their brand and what they do for the customer, both at the functional and emotional levels.
This disconnection from center can happen in a few different ways within an organization:
- Experience and expertise far beyond that of customers. Like any expert, people who are immersed in a given field have far more attuned senses and abilities to perceive and describe the offering. Experts simply have higher engagement and more experience, which breeds an assumption that many customers may be far more advanced than they are.
- High self-involvement. In another words, the fact that you feed your family selling paperclips does not mean that customers share that same high level of involvement with your products.
- Focus on shallow experience. If you work at Porsche and believe that Porsche makes only two-seat sports cars, you have created a very finite set of bounds on what you do. If you believe that you build the purest, most refined, and exciting vehicles in the world, other options are open to you. We will talk a bit more about this, but if you see your company as making only what's in the box, it places very specific bounds around what you do.
Over time, a company may touch with how they are perceived, a construct which can shift significantly over relatively short periods of time. In fact, those organizations may have never had a clear understanding of what their center was to begin with. This has everything to do with innovation and sustainability for us, as understanding the space in which your organizations and others operate in an unbiased way can be a tremendous starting point and anchor for innovation.
A Simple Metaphor for Why Center is Important to our Efforts
Think of the center of what your organization and brand represents in the minds of customers as a fixed pin attached to a heavy brick. Every innovation and new offering adds a rubber band and a new pin. Chances are that your company has an array of products and services close to your center pin. Forays further away from that center require strong pins, otherwise the tension is simply too much, and the pins simply break or pull out. Those far out pins may, in time, sprout their own supporting pins, and so on.
If you have enough pins and bands pulling in one direction, over time, the brick will move along in the same direction and re-find center. John Deere is one example: the man was originally a blacksmith who found a new way to make plows... which then became a tractor company... which then became an agricultural (and merchandising) giant. If the product creates enough tension, the company will come along with it.
Our goal is to gain an understanding of where the pins and bands are located, and to understand current boundaries. This will give us some feel for the landscape within which we will be working, and some feel for where the current boundaries lie. We won't consider these limits, per se, because a very significant innovation can instantly break the current boundaries of any organization. For example, if Lockheed Martin has indeed found a way to create compact fusion, they will instantly transcend any current association people may have with their organization. 'Unlimited energy for the world' is a pretty strong band and pin for any organization.
If you've ever seen a cognitive map, they look a lot like an overhead view of these pins and bands, and work much in the same way. If you haven't worked with cognitive maps in a rigorous way before, we will be doing exactly this in a few Lessons.
How Centers May Change Over Time
There are a few ways organizations can lose center over time. This may sound like a branding problem, and it certainly is... but it is also a foundational concern in developing new offerings. Unless you are a startup company, you will have existing thoughts and frames held by customers and the public at large about your organization. For better or worse, these existing thoughts and frames will affect perception of the new offering, just as your existing thoughts and frames about a person will affect how you perceive their new endeavors.
We will be diving into consumer research methodologies next week and cognitive mapping the week after, so we will indeed have tools to be able to find center for any organization in significant detail. But for the rest of this Lesson, we want to understand a concept related to an organization's center, one which defines much of how it will view and approach new offerings: White, Gray and Black Spaces.
Introduction to White, Gray, and Black Space Innovation
Introduction to White, Gray, and Black Space Innovation sxr133A Misperception of Innovation
There is a certain facet or theme of innovation that seems to dominate all others, and this is innovation as a new to the world, disruptive, revolutionary achievement.
Here is a representative sample of the types of endeavors typically associated with innovation, from a Washington Post year in review:
- NASA's Orion spacecraft
- Apple Watch
- ZMapp (treatment for Ebola)
- Lockheed Martin's aforementioned fusion concept
- Samsung Gear VR (virtual reality)
- Uber and the sharing economy
- Heartbleed (computer virus)
- HP Sprout (3D manipulation suite)
- Google's cancer detecting pill
This is certainly part of innovation, but in practice, innovation tends to be far more quiet, incremental, and purposeful. Where the persona attached to the revolutionary and disruptive innovation may be rockstar, the majority of innovation may be far closer to engineer or scientist. Innovation in practice is a rigorous and methodical endeavor.
So where there is a misuse, or at least popular misappropriation of the term innovation, pairing sustainability with it tends to have a multiplying effect... not only must your innovation be revolutionary and completely new to the world, it must also save the world at the same time. Tidal power generation and residential solar cogeneration and the like. While these are certainly important projects, what is important to us is that there are far more opportunities to innovate than those massive undertakings. Incremental progress is progress nonetheless, and many organizations large and small have the opportunity to participate.
White, Gray, and Black Spaces
In our efforts to understand sustainability-driven innovation of others in order to create our own, it is important that we create an understanding of the incumbent offerings and organizations already occupying the spaces we seek to explore. These organizations may be existing competitors well known to us in the core business, we may be exploring new ventures into other competitive spaces, or we may be creating completely new spaces. In each case, there may be a compelling strategy for us to create and frame our sustainability-driven offerings, but it is important that we understand the space in which we will be working.
In the following pages, we will discuss the three types of spaces and examine the strengths, weaknesses, and strategies of each.
White Space Innovation
White Space Innovation jls164
The Wide Open Spaces of Innovation
White spaces are exactly as they sound. These are indeed those new-to-the-world offerings that have the potential to truly disrupt the category, and potentially, an industry. While these may be the prototypical "innovations," there is one slight problem: incredibly smart people and organizations go decades without creating a single truly white space innovation, if ever. Consider that while there were 615,243 patents issued in the US in 2014, the vast majority of those patents do not come to commercial fruition, let alone become truly viable white space innovations.
White Space Innovation
Defining Characteristics:
These innovations are defined by the fact that they are often radical departures from the established, and may indeed signal a revolutionary change, even if in a small niche. While this revolutionary development may be in a category already established (e.g., biodiesel, computing), the means of creation may be a significant departure from any successful venture before it (e.g., biodiesel from algae in under an hour, quantum processors).
These innovations also have a tendency to have three things in common: long development times, elevated costs, and specialized knowledge. I purposely use the word "tendency" here because there will always be those white space innovations driven by a chance occurrence, or a single genius in a garage somewhere. There will always be those people and organizations that can capture lightning in a jar.
Pros:
- If successful, these innovations define the space in which others will operate
- Early acceptance by market can drive growth and further separation from peers
- Early success may draw in further talent and ideas
- Intellectual Property protections and proprietary technology
- Appealing to venture capital and investors
- Differentiation is unavoidable
Cons:
- Unless a wide technological or developmental moat, competitors will likely follow
- Patent protection only covers so much
- Potential for significant development cost
- Potential for significant development cycle time
- Unreliable pipeline of innovation
- Unsuccessful market entry can prove financially damaging
Best Utilized By:
Any organization that can craft a true white space innovation should utilize it to the fullest, but some organizations are better positioned to create them in the first place. Organizations with a significant in-house braintrust, ample resources, and the financial wherewithal to invest in long-term, potentially fruitless research tend to have the edge in creating these types of sustainability-driven innovations. In many cases, we are talking about large corporations, universities, labs, and the like as being the hotbeds of whitespace innovation, although many small "spin offs" are incubated by these larger enterprises every year.
Examples of White Space Innovation
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Work Into Algal and Biomass-Derived Fuels
The PNNL is doing some astounding stuff around biofuels. In one case, seemingly overnight, they produced research about WWII stories of canvas tents being digested in order to find an aggressive fungus to digest rough biomass for efficient use in biofuel creation.
Point Source Power
In a 2013 study, the U.N. found that 6 billion people worldwide have access to mobile phones, a full 1.5 billion more than have access to toilets. Craig Jacobson, Co-Founder of Point Source Power, recognized that many in the world have the need to charge a cell phone, but may be without accessible means to do so. To fill this need, he went about creating a thermal fuel cell with a probe that can be placed into a cooking fire, and which charges either a spare battery or a cell phone directly. It is not only a fascinating development, but one which is built at a bare minimum cost in order to be affordable to those in third world countries.
Please watch the following 3:05 video.
Video: Point Source Power (3:05)
CRAIG JACOBSEN, POINT SOURCE POWER: There are 1.5 billion people in the world today that don't have electricity. However they do have electric needs, primarily driven by the cell phone. They may have no electricity, no running water, no toilet, but they'll have a cell phone and they want to charge it and use it. What they do to charge their cell phones today is go through a very long, arduous process. They have to take their cell phone to what's called a town center, and they may have to walk for an hour or more to get there. They then leave it there, and if there's a line, maybe they have to leave it there overnight, for a day and a half before they get their cell phone back. and so it's very inconvenient, time consuming, and expensive. They would really like an in home solution where they can control their cell phone, they don't lose their cell phone for a day, and they can save some money, and that is really what we've tried to come up with.
The technology we're using is a fuel cell technology. Most people have probably heard of fuel cells. Fuel cells operate on a fuel, which typically Hydrogen and Oxygen air. And they use a chemical reaction to generate electricity rather than generating heat. This is actually one of our fuel cells. This little circle here it's about the size of a nickel. So, to make this operate we need three things: we need Oxygen, which is in the air around us, we need heat, and then we need fuel. In this case, I will take a butane torch. When I turn this on, I'm going to heat this up to about 700 or 800 degree Celsius. And when it gets to that temperature, it will turn on the LED light. Now of course in the developing world they don't have creme brulee torches. What do they have? What they have is a cook stove. Everyday they cook, and they've got a fire burning, and that fire has the fuel and the heat we need to operate. And every time they cook they can generate electricity.
This is actually one of our prototype units and it has several important parts. This is actually the fuel cell part. This goes in the stove, so they will put this into their cook stove. They'll cover it with fuel, which is typically a charcoal. The charcoal is what they set on fire. They start burning. They put a pot on top of that and they start cooking. Once this gets red hot, that starts generating electric power then goes into here, and we can store the power in a battery or we can go straight through this plug into a cell phone, or we can go into an LED light. And they can use that power any way that they want.
What we've done is radically simplified the system, and lowered the materials cost so that we have a very simple, cheap system. And this technology and this product can make a real difference in people's lives. Hundreds of millions or billions of people around the world could use this type of technology and really benefit from it. These are people that will never get electricity in their lifetime unless something like this comes out. And so it makes us feel very good, and very proud of the work that we're doing. That we can have that kind of impact. And we hope that other people will join us in this journey as we go forward and bring this technology into these markets.
Stonyfield / WikiPearl Edible Packaging
There are a few interesting innovations at play here, but it will remain to be seen if the technology, design, and taste is truly up to the rigors of the supermarket, or if this product will live and die as some sort of novelty. Please review the article titled "Stonyfield tests package-less froyo."
Gray Space Innovation
Gray Space Innovation jls164Incremental Innovation and Refinement
Gray space innovations are those where there may be some incumbent product or service, but it may be an unestablished or immature market. This is where meaningful improvements to the offering or a small handful of differentiators can be enough for an organization to enter the competitive fray and explore.
Gray Space Innovation
Defining Characteristics:
These innovations are defined by the fact that they many times represent incremental innovation. This may be manifested by the organization developing a new set of attributes, a new delivery method, new cost structure, or other innovations. We will explore these in more detail when we cover the ten types of innovation in a few lessons, but the key for gray space innovation is remembering that they are built on incremental innovation.
One misconception, perhaps driven by the interpretation of white space innovation as the "true" innovation, is that gray space innovation is not really "innovation." What is ironic about this is that many of the most famous innovations in any realm, were not white space innovation, but in fact, gray space innovation. Some examples? From Henry Ford's assembly line (actually Samuel Colt's) to Apple's computer mouse (actually Xerox), these innovations may be refined and popularized by one organization, but have their roots in the white space innovations of others. Much of technology, including smartphones, tend to exhibit gray space innovation. A new system or way of operation here, a new sensor there, a revised interface.
Pros:
- "Fast follower" or incremental approach to innovation allows accelerated cycle times
- Typically lower development cost than white space innovation
- Reduced need/cost to market an already semi-established concept
- Ability to position offering against an incumbent
- Allows a sort of "a la carte" combination of innovations in one offering
- Builds on existing market successes and preferences
- Reduces the number of unknowns in creating the offering around pricing, features, etc.
Cons:
- Intellectual property protections may not offer total coverage
- Requires some level of differentiation or education of the market (like most products)
- Not as wide of a technology or competence moat to discourage competitors
- Potential to be derivative and confusing for customers
- May enter a market already dominated by the originator or another incumbent
- Requires some speed in development, lest your offering becomes obsolete before hitting the market
Best Utilized By:
Many organizations. This is perhaps the most common and versatile space for innovation, as it allows any organization to leverage its specific strengths while evolving a concept. An organization with an especially strong brand can elect to leverage this fact by popularizing its take on an offering, while an organization with especially efficient organization may elect to come into the market as the low-cost player by leveraging its strengths.
Examples of Gray Space Innovation
Apple's Vision for the Xerox GUI and Mouse
Sometimes, gray space innovation comes down to seeing potential in the offerings of others that even they can't. A pure example of what this can look like is Steve Jobs' visit to Xerox PARC. Xerox saw the GUI and mouse, at best, as an overpriced curiosity, Jobs saw it as a potential revolution in computing. (The most important segment begins at 6:26)
Video: How Steve Jobs got the ideas of GUI from XEROX (6:26)
PRESENTER: It all began in 1971 in Palo Alto, just south of San Francisco, when Xerox, the copier company, set up the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC. Xerox management had a sinking feeling that if people started reading computer screens instead of paper, Xerox was in trouble unless they could dominate the paperless office of the future. You could take computer technology into the office and make the office a much better place to work, more productive, more enjoyable-- a lot more enjoyable, more interesting, more rewarding, and so we set to work on it.
PRESENTER: Bob Taylor ran PARC's computer science lab, and one of the first things he did was to buy bean bags for his researchers to sit on and brainstorm.
BOB TAYLOR: These are a couple of the original beanbag chairs. The role of beanbag chairs in computer science is ease of use.
PRESENTER: OK. It was said that of the top 100 computer researchers in the world, 58 worked at PARC-- strange, as the staff never exceeded 50. But Taylor gave these nerd geniuses unlimited resources and protected them from commercial pressures.
PRESENTER: It's very comfortable.
BOB TAYLOR: Now let's see you get out of it.
PRESENTER: I feel my neural capacity already increasing.
BOB TAYLOR: There you go.
PRESENTER: Oh God.
JOHN WARNOCK: The atmosphere at PARC was electric. There was total intellectual freedom. There was no conventional wisdom. Almost every idea was up for challenge and got challenged regularly.
LARRY TESLER: The management said, go create the new world. We don't understand it. Here are people who have a lot of ideas and tremendous talent-- young, energetic.
ADELE GOLDBERG: People came there specifically to work on five-year programs where their dreams.
PRESENTER: This is a computer room in the basement of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. About 25 years ago, they built the Max time-sharing system in here, and now it's loaded with all sorts of other computers. And there's one that we're really interested in here. Let's see. Here it is. Let me turn on the lights. OK. Here we have it. This is a Xerox Alto computer built around 1973. Some people would argue that this is the first personal computer. It really isn't, because for one thing, it was never for sale, and the parts alone cost about $10,000. But it has all the elements of a modern personal computer, and without it, we wouldn't have the Macintosh, we wouldn't have Windows, we wouldn't have most of the things we value in computing today. And ironically, none of those things has the Xerox name on it.
SPEAKER 1: What's the mail this morning?
PRESENTER: This promotional film made in the mid 70s to flaunt Xerox PARC research shows just how revolutionary the Alto was. It was friendly and intuitive.
SPEAKER 2: This is an experimental office system. It's in use now--
PRESENTER: It had the first GUI using a mouse to point to information on the screen. It was linked to other PCs by a system called Ethernet, the first computer network. And what you saw on the screen was precisely what you got on your laser printer. It was way ahead of its time.
LARRY TESLER: Everybody wanted to make a real difference. We really thought we were changing the world and that at the end of this project or this set of projects, personal computing would burst on the scene exactly the way we had envisioned it, and take everybody by total surprise.
PRESENTER: But the brilliant researchers at PARC could never persuade Xerox management that their vision was accurate. Head office in New York ignored the revolutionary technologies they owned 3,000 miles away. They just didn't get it.
JOHN WARNOCK: And none of the main body of the company was prepared to accept the answers, so there was a tremendous mismatch between the management and what the researchers were doing, in that these guys had never fantasized about what the future of the office was going to be. And when it was presented to them, the had no mechanisms for turning those ideas into real-life products. And that was really the frustrating part of it, because you were talking to people who didn't understand the vision. Yet the vision was getting created every day within the Palo Alto Research Center, and there was no one to receive that vision.
PRESENTER: But a few miles down the road from Palo Alto was a man ready to share the vision. The most dangerous man in Silicon Valley sits in an office in this building. People love him and hate him, often at the same time. For 10 years, by sheer force of will, he made the personal computer industry follow his direction. With this guy, we're not talking about someone driven by the profit motive in a desire for an opulent retirement at the age of 40. No, we're talking holy war. We're talking rivers of blood and fields of dead martyrs to the cause of greater computing. We're talking about a guy who sees the personal computer as his tool for changing the world. We're talking about Steve Jobs.
STEVE JOBS: Hi. I'm Steve Jobs.
When I wasn't sure what the word charisma meant I met Steve Jobs and then I knew
BOB METCALFE: Steve Jobs is on my eternal heroes list. There 's nothing he can ever do to get off it.
LARRY TESLER: He wanted you to be great, and he wanted you to create something that was great. And he was going to make you do that.
BOB METCALFE: He's also obnoxious, and this comes from his high standards. He has extremely high standards, and he has no patience with people who don't either share those standards or perform to them.
STEVE JOBS: And I'm also one of these people that I don't really care about being right. I just care about success.
PRESENTER: Steve Jobs had co-founded Apple Computer in 1976. The first popular personal computer, the Apple II, was a hit and made Steve Jobs one of the biggest names in a brand-new industry. At the height of Apple's early success in December 1979, Jobs, then all of 24, had a privileged invitation to visit Xerox PARC.
STEVE JOBS: And they showed me, really, three things, but I was so blinded by the first one that I didn't even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programming. They showed me that. But I didn't even see that. The other one they showed me was really a networked computer system. They had over 100 Alto computers, all networked, using email, et cetera, et cetera. I didn't even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I had ever seen in my life. Now, remember, it was very flawed. What we saw was incomplete. They'd done a bunch of things wrong. But we didn't know that at the time. And still, though, they had-- the germ of the idea was there, and they'd done it very well. And within 10 minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday.
PRESENTER: It was a turning point. Jobs decided this was the way forward for Apple.
ADELE GOLDBERG: He came back, and-- I almost said "asked," but the truth is demanded, that his entire programming team get a demo of the Smaltalk system. And the then head of the science center asked me to give the demo, because Steve specifically asked for me to give the demo. And I said, no way. I had a big argument with the Xerox executives, telling them that they were about to give away the kitchen sink. And I said I would only do it if I were ordered to do it, because then, of course, it would be their responsibility. And that's what they did.
SPEAKER 3: The mouse is a pointing device that moves a cursor around the display screen.
PRESENTER: Adele and her colleagues showed the Apple programmers an Alto machine running a graphical user interface.
SPEAKER 3: A selected window displays above other windows, much like placing a piece of paper on top of a stack on a desk.
PRESENTER: The visitors from Apple saw a computer that was designed to be easy-to-use, a machine that anybody could operate and find friendly, even the French.
SPEAKER 3: Choose one.
BILL ATKINSON: I think mostly what we got in that hour-and-a-half was inspiration, and basically, just sort of a bolstering of our convictions that a more graphical way to do things would make this business computer more accessible.
LARRY TESLER: After an hour looking at demos, they understood our technology and what it meant more than any Xerox executive understood it after years of showing it to them.
STEVE JOBS: Basically, they were copier heads that just had no clue about a computer, what it could do. And so they just grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today. It could have been a company 10 times its size. It could have been IBM. It could have been the IBM of the '90s. It could have been the Microsoft of the '90s.
Nest Thermostat
While there had been thermostats, touchscreen thermostats, even smart thermostats before it, Nest brought the most intelligent features and best design into one product. Central to the Nest concept is its ability to learn from the habits of those in the home, as well as the ability to leverage "the internet of things" to become even more efficient and seamless (for example, relying on the motion sensors in Nest smoke alarms to know when the home is occupied or not, or looking at the weather forecast and adjusting behavior).
While the Nest modus operandi for gray space innovation is to take very boring, "dumb" things and make them smart and sustainable, we can only imagine the developments now that Nest Labs is owned by Google. Please watch the following 2:11 video.
Video: How the Nest Learning Thermostat Learns (2:11)
OK. Most people don't really think about their thermostat. But here's an eye-opening fact. The thermostat on your wall controls half your energy bill. A lot of that energy is wasted, usually when the heat or AC stays on after you've left the house. Programmable thermostats were supposed to help, but there's a hitch. They're incredibly complicated. According to one study, 90% of people don't program them properly, and they all lost the EPA's Energy Star rating in 2009. But what if a thermostat could program itself around your life, not the other way around? The Nest Learning Thermostat does.
Nest learns when you change the temperature, so treat it like a normal thermostat. Turn it up when you're cold and down when you're hot. Nest will remember your temperature adjustments and use an array of sensors, sophisticated algorithms, and the processing power of a computer to help it learn. We call it Nest Sense. After a few days, you'll be adjusting Nest less. Within a week, it will put all it has learned into a schedule for your home. Nest will begin noticing when you're gone and will turn on Auto-Away to avoid heating or cooling an empty house.
To make the biggest impact on your energy bill, teach Nest good energy saving habits in the first week. Remember to turn the temperature down at night and when you leave the house. You can control Nest from anywhere using your laptop, smartphone, or tablet. Soon you won't have to remember. Nest will do it for you. And as Nest learns from you, you can learn from Nest.
The Nest Leaf will guide you to more energy savings. Changing the temperature just one degree can reduce your energy use by up to 5%. Check your Energy History to see how much you saved. You'll see if your temperature changes, the weather, or Auto-Away saved you the most. So maybe it's time to think about your thermostat.
Tesla Powerwall
This is an example of a fairly straightforward concept, packaged elegantly, sold brilliantly, and benefiting from tremendous efficiencies of scale. Battery backups for homes, and even home-built power cells to capture solar energy, have been around for years, but, like Nest, Tesla is making it interesting and feasible for the common homeowner. If you wonder about Tesla's ability to make battery backup interesting, consider that they booked $800 million of preorders in the first week, on track to surpass the iPhone for one of the most successful new product launches in recent history. Please watch the following 4:00 video.
Video: Tesla’s Powerwall Home Battery: The Stuff Worth Knowing (4:00)
BRENT ROSE (TECH WRITER): Hey guys, I'm Brent Rose tech writer and gentle assassin. Elon Musk just announced Tesla's first home battery product. He thinks it's going to change the way the world consumes and stores energy. Let's break this down so you can sound smart at your weekend barbecue.
First off, let's talk about the product itself. Tesla's powerwall is basically a big lithium-ion battery. It's about four feet tall, three feet wide, and 7 inches deep. It looks kind of like the Monolith the monkeys worshipped in 2001 a Space Odyssey. Now Tesla isn't the first company to offer home batteries, but they're selling it for about a third of the price of the competitors and they say it'll last a lot longer. It comes in two different flavors. There's a 10 kilowatt hour version for 3,500 bucks which is basically used as backup power in case you have an outage or there's the seven kilowatt hour version for 3000. This one is meant for daily cycling that means powering up and depleting that power every single day running your house off of it basically. The unit sleek enough that can be mounted to the wall inside your garage or even an exterior wall on your house. They can be lined up side by side by side to match the power requirements of your home. It also comes in several different colors in case you wanted to match that pretty model s you got inside your garage.
Tesla is also going to be selling an infinitely scalable hundred kilowatt hour power pack. That's just for utility companies and commercial purposes, so let's leave that aside for today. So why is this a big deal? Well solar energy can obviously only be generated when the sun is out in the middle of the day. However, peak energy consumption happens at night when there's no potential for solar energy. So all that energy we generate during the day essentially goes to waste. What this system does, it gives us a way to store that energy and then be used later when we turn the lights on, run the dishwasher, and watch TV. If you have enough solar panels, the system has the potential to take you completely off the grid. Now you don't have to have solar panels to use the power wall, because you can use the grid to charge it up too. One theoretical benefit could be charging it up during off-peak hours when electricity is cheapest and then running your home off of it during the peak evening hours when electricity prices go up. That said, given the current price of the batteries, we just don't see the cost-benefit here.
The place where it would make sense is if you lived in a blackout prone region. The ability to charge up when you did have power and then run your home off the batteries when the grid goes down could be a real lifesaver. But what if you use these things plus solar to get completely off the grid? How much money could you save? Well, the average U.S. household uses about 30 kilowatt hours per day or just over ten thousand nine hundred kilowatt hours per year. So, let's say you get four of Tesla's seven kilowatt-hour batteries at three thousand apiece. That's twelve thousand dollars for the batteries alone. Now the average cost of electricity in the U.S. is roughly thirteen cents per kilowatt hour so you would need to use roughly 90 2300 kilowatt hours before you broke even on the cost of the batteries and the average rate of consumption that's eight and a half years before this thing pays for itself. And that doesn't account for the cost of installation, of maintenance, of the price of an inverter, which would be thousands, or for the gradual decreasing efficiency of a lithium-ion battery over the course of its lifetime. Again these are just averages, but currently this is not something that's going to save most Americans any money, and that's not even factoring in the cost of solar panels. That said, if you live in a place where energy is more expensive, you would break even sooner. For example, in Hawaii the cost per kilowatt hour is a whopping 37 cents. At that rate, it would only take about three years to recoup the cost of the battery which is approaching reasonable.
Ultimately, if you're just trying to save money, then this isn't the way to go yet, but if you've got the cash to spend and you live in a sunny area, then the concept of being able to live independently of the power grid has a lot of appeal. So what do you think? Is this really the beginning of an energy revolution or is this just Tesla trying to sell more batteries to justify the existence of its gigafactory? Let us know what you think in the comments and don't forget to subscribe to Wired. Thanks for watching.
Black Space Innovation
Black Space Innovation jls164Taking On All Challengers, Head On
Think of black space innovation perhaps as a continuation of gray space innovation, just more intense (thus, our stroll further down the color spectrum). Black space innovation is when the space is already crowded with incumbents, but your organization has the ability to innovate and differentiate the offering by leveraging multiple organizational strengths: efficiencies of scale and manufacturing, logistics, distribution, brand, vertical integration, and more. In many cases, this happens when a large player enters the space, but can also be when a smaller organization is able to outmaneuver the competition or otherwise bring its unique strengths to bear.
Regardless of the mechanism or organization, black space innovation is all about the application of significant amounts of leverage; not just a handful of innovations, but entire constellations of innovation.
Black Space Innovation
Defining Characteristics:
These innovations are typically defined by the fact that they are already crowded spaces, and the attempt for one company to bring enough leverage to bear that the market aligns behind them. In order to do this, it requires a significant effort on a variety of fronts, as an incremental innovation would likely not justify the organization entering the competitive fray.
Pros:
- Entry into more mature space allows many unknowns to be revealed by market
- Greater potential for research and learning
- Even lower cost to market or educate into a more mature space
- High potential to leverage the organization's full portfolio of strength
Cons:
- It may be more efficient to merge or acquire an organization already in the space
- Brand may not translate well into the new space
- Competitors may be able to adapt more quickly than your organization
- If leveraging size, potential for high startup cost
- Unsuccessful market entry can prove financially damaging
Best Utilized By:
Typically larger or more established organizations, or those organizations which elect to consciously and actively sit on the sidelines of innovation until the time for entry is appropriate. While "actively sitting on the sidelines" may sound like an oxymoron, it is important to realize that an insights or market intelligence team at a large organization could be performing more consumer and competitive research than those actually actively participating in the market at the time.
Examples of Black Space Innovation
IKEA LED
While there are quite a few established players in the LED market, namely Cree and Philips, IKEA has consciously committed to use its size, scale, efficiency, and brand to take LED to the next level. While it could have struck a supply agreement, it instead elected to start from scratch and commit to taking on the manufacturing of its bulbs. We will be covering the IKEA LED case in a bit more detail later in this course, but it is an example of a large company consciously electing to enter a fairly mature and crowded market. Please watch the following 1:27 silent video.
Video: Design Power of LED. Music only, no speech. (1:26)
Veta La Palma Aquaculture
As related in this compelling talk by Chef Dan Barber, Veta la Palma has taken a drastically different approach to aquaculture by making it sustainable, and its fish some of the world's best. In this case, Veta la Palma is not just taking on a group of tangible competitors, but instead, it is challenging an entire method of farming and going to market with fish. Veta la Palma is doing things drastically different in service of a drastically different product and in a drastically more beneficial way.
Please watch the following 18:55 Ted Talk "How I fell in love with a fish" by Dan Barber.
Video: How I fell in love with a fish (5:26)
So, I've known a lot of fish in my life. I've loved only two. That first one, it was more like a passionate affair. It was a beautiful fish: flavorful, textured, meaty, a bestseller on the menu. What a fish. (Laughter) Even better, it was farm-raised to the supposed highest standards of sustainability. So you could feel good about selling it.
I was in a relationship with this beauty for several months. One day, the head of the company called and asked if I'd speak at an event about the farm's sustainability. "Absolutely," I said. Here was a company trying to solve what's become this unimaginable problem for us chefs: How do we keep fish on our menus?
For the past 50 years, we've been fishing the seas like we clear-cut forests. It's hard to overstate the destruction. Ninety percent of large fish, the ones we love -- the tunas, the halibuts, the salmons, swordfish -- they've collapsed. There's almost nothing left. So, for better or for worse, aquaculture, fish farming, is going to be a part of our future. A lot of arguments against it: Fish farms pollute -- most of them do anyway -- and they're inefficient. Take tuna, a major drawback. It's got a feed conversion ratio of 15 to one. That means it takes fifteen pounds of wild fish to get you one pound of farm tuna. Not very sustainable. It doesn't taste very good either.
So here, finally, was a company trying to do it right. I wanted to support them. The day before the event, I called the head of P.R. for the company. Let's call him Don.
"Don," I said, "just to get the facts straight, you guys are famous for farming so far out to sea, you don't pollute."
"That's right," he said. "We're so far out, the waste from our fish gets distributed, not concentrated." And then he added, "We're basically a world unto ourselves. That feed conversion ratio? 2.5 to one," he said. "Best in the business."
2.5 to one, great. "2.5 what? What are you feeding?"
"Sustainable proteins," he said.
"Great," I said. Got off the phone. And that night, I was lying in bed, and I thought: What the hell is a sustainable protein? (Laughter)
So the next day, just before the event, I called Don. I said, "Don, what are some examples of sustainable proteins?"
He said he didn't know. He would ask around. Well, I got on the phone with a few people in the company; no one could give me a straight answer until finally, I got on the phone with the head biologist. Let's call him Don too. (Laughter)
"Don," I said, "what are some examples of sustainable proteins?"
Well, he mentioned some algaes and some fish meals, and then he said chicken pellets. I said, "Chicken pellets?"
He said, "Yeah, feathers, skin, bone meal, scraps, dried and processed into feed."
I said, "What percentage of your feed is chicken?" Thinking, you know, two percent.
"Well, it's about 30 percent," he said.
I said, "Don, what's sustainable about feeding chicken to fish?" (Laughter)
There was a long pause on the line, and he said, "There's just too much chicken in the world." (Laughter)
I fell out of love with this fish. (Laughter) No, not because I'm some self-righteous, goody-two shoes foodie. I actually am. (Laughter) No, I actually fell out of love with this fish because, I swear to God, after that conversation, the fish tasted like chicken. (Laughter)
This second fish, it's a different kind of love story. It's the romantic kind, the kind where the more you get to know your fish, you love the fish. I first ate it at a restaurant in southern Spain. A journalist friend had been talking about this fish for a long time. She kind of set us up. (Laughter) It came to the table a bright, almost shimmering, white color. The chef had overcooked it. Like twice over. Amazingly, it was still delicious.
Who can make a fish taste good after it's been overcooked? I can't, but this guy can. Let's call him Miguel -- actually his name is Miguel. (Laughter) And no, he didn't cook the fish, and he's not a chef, at least in the way that you and I understand it. He's a biologist at Veta La Palma. It's a fish farm in the southwestern corner of Spain. It's at the tip of the Guadalquivir river.
Until the 1980s, the farm was in the hands of the Argentinians. They raised beef cattle on what was essentially wetlands. They did it by draining the land. They built this intricate series of canals, and they pushed water off the land and out into the river. Well, they couldn't make it work, not economically. And ecologically, it was a disaster. It killed like 90 percent of the birds, which, for this place, is a lot of birds. And so in 1982, a Spanish company with an environmental conscience purchased the land.
What did they do? They reversed the flow of water. They literally flipped the switch. Instead of pushing water out, they used the channels to pull water back in. They flooded the canals. They created a 27,000-acre fish farm -- bass, mullet, shrimp, eel -- and in the process, Miguel and this company completely reversed the ecological destruction. The farm's incredible. I mean, you've never seen anything like this. You stare out at a horizon that is a million miles away, and all you see are flooded canals and this thick, rich marshland.
I was there not long ago with Miguel. He's an amazing guy, like three parts Charles Darwin and one part Crocodile Dundee. (Laughter) Okay? There we are slogging through the wetlands, and I'm panting and sweating, got mud up to my knees, and Miguel's calmly conducting a biology lecture. Here, he's pointing out a rare Black-shouldered Kite. Now, he's mentioning the mineral needs of phytoplankton. And here, here he sees a grouping pattern that reminds him of the Tanzanian Giraffe.
It turns out, Miguel spent the better part of his career in the Mikumi National Park in Africa. I asked him how he became such an expert on fish.
He said, "Fish? I didn't know anything about fish. I'm an expert in relationships." And then he's off, launching into more talk about rare birds and algaes and strange aquatic plants.
And don't get me wrong, that was really fascinating, you know, the biotic community unplugged, kind of thing. It's great, but I was in love. And my head was swooning over that overcooked piece of delicious fish I had the night before. So I interrupted him. I said, "Miguel, what makes your fish taste so good?"
He pointed at the algae.
"I know, dude, the algae, the phytoplankton, the relationships: It's amazing. But what are your fish eating? What's the feed conversion ratio?"
Well, he goes on to tell me it's such a rich system that the fish are eating what they'd be eating in the wild. The plant biomass, the phytoplankton, the zooplankton, it's what feeds the fish. The system is so healthy, it's totally self-renewing. There is no feed. Ever heard of a farm that doesn't feed its animals?
Later that day, I was driving around this property with Miguel, and I asked him, I said, "For a place that seems so natural, unlike like any farm I'd ever been at, how do you measure success?"
At that moment, it was as if a film director called for a set change. And we rounded the corner and saw the most amazing sight: thousands and thousands of pink flamingos, a literal pink carpet for as far as you could see.
"That's success," he said. "Look at their bellies, pink. They're feasting." Feasting? I was totally confused.
I said, "Miguel, aren't they feasting on your fish?" (Laughter)
"Yes," he said. (Laughter) "We lose 20 percent of our fish and fish eggs to birds. Well, last year, this property had 600,000 birds on it, more than 250 different species. It's become, today, the largest and one of the most important private bird sanctuaries in all of Europe."
I said, "Miguel, isn't a thriving bird population like the last thing you want on a fish farm?" (Laughter) He shook his head, no.
He said, "We farm extensively, not intensively. This is an ecological network. The flamingos eat the shrimp. The shrimp eat the phytoplankton. So the pinker the belly, the better the system."
Okay, so let's review: a farm that doesn't feed its animals, and a farm that measures its success on the health of its predators. A fish farm, but also a bird sanctuary. Oh, and by the way, those flamingos, they shouldn't even be there in the first place. They brood in a town 150 miles away, where the soil conditions are better for building nests. Every morning, they fly 150 miles into the farm. And every evening, they fly 150 miles back. (Laughter) They do that because they're able to follow the broken white line of highway A92. (Laughter) No kidding.
I was imagining a "March of the Penguins" thing, so I looked at Miguel. I said, "Miguel, do they fly 150 miles to the farm, and then do they fly 150 miles back at night? Do they do that for the children?"
He looked at me like I had just quoted a Whitney Houston song. (Laughter) He said, "No; they do it because the food's better." (Laughter)
I didn't mention the skin of my beloved fish, which was delicious -- and I don't like fish skin; I don't like it seared, I don't like it crispy. It's that acrid, tar-like flavor. I almost never cook with it. Yet, when I tasted it at that restaurant in southern Spain, it tasted not at all like fish skin. It tasted sweet and clean, like you were taking a bite of the ocean. I mentioned that to Miguel, and he nodded. He said, "The skin acts like a sponge. It's the last defense before anything enters the body. It evolved to soak up impurities." And then he added, "But our water has no impurities."
OK. A farm that doesn't feed its fish, a farm that measures its success by the success of its predators. And then I realized when he says, "A farm that has no impurities," he made a big understatement, because the water that flows through that farm comes in from the Guadalquivir River. It's a river that carries with it all the things that rivers tend to carry these days: chemical contaminants, pesticide runoff. And when it works its way through the system and leaves, the water is cleaner than when it entered. The system is so healthy, it purifies the water. So, not just a farm that doesn't feed its animals, not just a farm that measures its success by the health of its predators, but a farm that's literally a water purification plant -- and not just for those fish, but for you and me as well. Because when that water leaves, it dumps out into the Atlantic. A drop in the ocean, I know, but I'll take it, and so should you, because this love story, however romantic, is also instructive. You might say it's a recipe for the future of good food, whether we're talking about bass or beef cattle.
What we need now is a radically new conception of agriculture, one in which the food actually tastes good. (Laughter) (Applause) But for a lot of people, that's a bit too radical. We're not realists, us foodies; we're lovers. We love farmers' markets, we love small family farms, we talk about local food, we eat organic. And when you suggest these are the things that will ensure the future of good food, someone, somewhere stands up and says, "Hey guy, I love pink flamingos, but how are you going to feed the world?" How are you going to feed the world?
Can I be honest? I don't love that question. No, not because we already produce enough calories to more than feed the world. One billion people will go hungry today. One billion -- that's more than ever before -- because of gross inequalities in distribution, not tonnage. Now, I don't love this question because it's determined the logic of our food system for the last 50 years.
Feed grain to herbivores, pesticides to monocultures, chemicals to soil, chicken to fish, and all along agribusiness has simply asked, "If we're feeding more people more cheaply, how terrible could that be?" That's been the motivation, it's been the justification: it's been the business plan of American agriculture. We should call it what it is: a business in liquidation, a business that's quickly eroding ecological capital that makes that very production possible. That's not a business, and it isn't agriculture.
Our breadbasket is threatened today, not because of diminishing supply, but because of diminishing resources. Not by the latest combine and tractor invention, but by fertile land; not by pumps, but by fresh water; not by chainsaws, but by forests; and not by fishing boats and nets, but by fish in the sea.
Want to feed the world? Let's start by asking: How are we going to feed ourselves? Or better: How can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself? (Applause) To do that, don't look at the agribusiness model for the future. It's really old, and it's tired. It's high on capital, chemistry and machines, and it's never produced anything really good to eat. Instead, let's look to the ecological model. That's the one that relies on two billion years of on-the-job experience.
Look to Miguel, farmers like Miguel. Farms that aren't worlds unto themselves; farms that restore instead of deplete; farms that farm extensively instead of just intensively; farmers that are not just producers, but experts in relationships. Because they're the ones that are experts in flavor, too. And if I'm going to be really honest, they're a better chef than I'll ever be. You know, I'm okay with that, because if that's the future of good food, it's going to be delicious.
Thank you. (Applause)
Analysis of WGB Spaces
Analysis of WGB Spaces jls164A Story
I once guest judged an Entrepreneurship capstone course at a major university, a multidisciplinary effort between business, engineering, and design schools. The intent of the course was for these teams to work together to create an innovative product release from start to finish, including financials, marketing sizing, working prototypes using 3D printing, etc. It was an impressive program with impressive students.
While they spent the day trotting out their presentations like proud parents, I began to see a microcosm of an issue I have seen for years, over and over again, in both the private and public sector. Simply put, in the scope of innovation, new product development, or campaign development, research is seen as somewhere between a speedbump and a roadblock.
The teams that day were no different in composition than many you might see on a lean innovation team: a couple of marketers/researchers, a finance guy, engineers, and designers. Because the teams were "on the clock," there was usually a brainstorming session to develop an idea, followed by the marketing people doing some superficial research while the designers and engineers started on "the real work." In any organization, this is played out in similar ways: budgets and time are constrained, so there is a push to get to the prototype as quickly as possible. Getting to Beta quickly will be a significant goal, but this speed should by no means be because initial research was under resourced or ignored.
So, what is the pattern? That the first step the teams took were to revert to something a member was passionate about, then back filling the research to confirm the chosen direction. This is no different than a creative director executing concepts and animatics based on "gut" or any team looking to use the research to "confirm" instead of "explore." I can absolutely tell you that this syndrome is in no way limited to college students. It is everywhere.
I can also tell you that when research is an afterthought used to confirm pre-Beta offerings, it typically ends up in one of three ways:
- It confirms a decent, but sub-optimal product. This may seem acceptable until considering that the product tested at Beta and the next iteration may be drastically different.
- The results are ambiguous, and the team elects to ignore warning signs and emphasize the positive. The offering fails at Beta.
- The results are so negative they can not be denied. The effort grinds to a halt, and may have to restart from scratch. The team may be disbanded.
Why do I share this story?
- Critical analysis may define the space and the potential opportunities, but WGB space illuminates viability, and how your organization may best apply its leverage in the space. The opportunities identified in critical analysis are raw and open... and therefore can be magnets for mindless passion and a rush to begin building the offering. This is exactly what we want to avoid.
- The goal of White, Gray, and Black spaces should not be to evaluate or "rank" potential opportunities, but as a tool to understand context, scope, and how the organization can engage in the space. At face value, all three spaces are equally valuable.
Examples of Tactics to Analyze WGB Spaces
In our studies thus far, we have worked from the coarse analysis of examining areas of opportunity and merged into increasingly fine-grained analysis. We have also worked on understanding the foundations of sustainability, to the strategies and tactics organizations use in sustainability, to the critical analysis of public filings, to understanding the overall opportunities in those filings and the competitive context of those opportunities. We are now analyzing the early phases of how organizations may be able to leverage those opportunities.
Let's follow this flow for the earlier example of the opportunity Tesla's growth presents in regard to training and licensing technicians on all-electric drivetrains. At this point, we have roughly scoped the opportunity and it is of interest to us. Now, we want to understand the context within the opportunity exists, specifically how it is a White, Gray, or Black space, and how the organization may be equipped (or not) to move the idea to the next step.
While tactics to understand WGB spaces can be wildly different–from ethnography to forensic accounting–here are the types of questions that would further narrow the scope to understand the space. Let's imagine we are an independent automotive training institute curious about the opportunity of training techs to service Teslas.
Competitive Intelligence
What organizations currently operate in this space? We may be surrounded by other highly-competent automotive training institutes, as well as the potential that others have entered the electric technician training space from other vectors. Perhaps Tesla itself is training all technicians, or another training institute has a well-rounded offering of courses on servicing all-electric drivetrains. We would want to explore all other organizations in the space, regardless of if we would consider them a competitor or not.
How dedicated are these organizations to the space? Are they investing, divesting? In understanding the other organizations functioning in the electric technician training space, we would want to gain some initial understanding of their commitment to the initiative. Do they have 85 courses dedicated to conventional drivetrains and only one for electric drivetrains... or did they just complete the construction of a new hybrid and electric training building on their campus? Many initiatives are taken on and abandoned, or proven not viable for another organization... we would want to understand those organizations and what those trajectories may have looked like.
What organizations would we expect to operate in this space? While not as widely embraced by the market, Nissan has the all-electric Leaf... how were those technicians trained? By Nissan? By a contractor in the US or abroad? Did a training institute create a course specifically for the Leaf? Furthermore, if we were to imagine those organizations that might be interested in this opportunity, who would we expect to see?
Are there any indications of other organizations seeking to enter the space? Part of the answer to this question might be revealed in critical analysis, but are there signs that any organizations–large or small–are interested in the space? Are any organizations having success in related spaces (i.e., training technicians on hybrid drivetrains) that could set the framework for an entry?
Patent and trademark search. Are there any recent patents, trademarks, or other intellectual property filings showing that an organization might be interested in the space? If a trademark search showed "The electric drivetrain experts" as being filed by another training institute three months ago, that would be something to follow up on and understand at greater depth.
Are there any indications of resource movement into the space? An interesting one here can be looking into any changes in title or any postings to LinkedIn, for example. While official organizational communication channels may be tight-lipped, someone may decide to give an interview that perhaps they shouldn't have or post something to their profile page that can signal organizational moves behind a new offering. In this case, if the Director of Training Curriculum posted that his current work includes exploring electric drivetrain technology, we would want to know that.
Expert Analysis
Are there any failed past initiatives in the space? Much can be learned from false starts and failures. Experts in a given field (covered by a non-disclosure agreement, of course) who have been around and connected in all the right places could probably advise as to some of the challenges and failed initiatives of the past.
Known pitfalls or limits to technology that have hindered other efforts in the space? Perhaps organizations have attempted to train technicians on electric drivetrain systems, but were unable to secure drivetrains to allow students to work hands on. Perhaps the electric drivetrains present potentially lethal voltage that could kill an untrained technician, therefore making the training of these technicians a liability minefield. Again, consulting with subject matter experts can help to understand the overall story quickly.
Any other general knowledge on the space? Are there similar models for technician training that just don't apply in this case? Perhaps, to avoid investing in training on short-lived technologies, a rule of thumb is that training institutes require 3 million units of a technology to be on the road before considering adding a course. At this point, we are trying to quickly and effectively reduce the number of assumptions we hold about the space and the opportunity, and speaking with subject matter experts can be an excellent way to do this.
Initial Mapping of Organizational Strengths Onto the Space
How do the organization's strengths and relationships map onto this space? Consider this a 'back of the napkin' analysis, but think about the leverage your organization can bring into the space. Perhaps your training institute is well-positioned to add electric drivetrain courses, but is lacking any relationships or expertise in the electric drivetrain space. Perhaps your training institute is slow to respond but has the scale and connections to enter the space quickly and significantly.
How quickly can the organization add needed competencies, and at what cost? In looking at this initial map of strengths, we would seek to consider if the needed competencies could be gained with a consultant or subcontractor, for example. Marketing and reaching potential customers in new spaces may not be a strength, but is a competency that can be easily added, while finding the full-time trainers who know the intricacies of all-electric drivetrains may be a far greater challenge requiring full-time employees.
Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks jls164
"I now consider myself to be at the beginning of the beginning of making something serious."
Understanding Composition and Space
In this Lesson, we begin to merge from researching the techniques and decisions of others, to beginning to frame what our own work may look like. It is still very early, the "beginning of the beginning," as van Gogh stated it, but we are starting to make decisions at this point, even if we do not necessarily realize it.
As we go through the process of understanding the WGB space and doing base research, we are already beginning to understand how our innovation may be composed, and the spaces available to us. We will understand if the space in which we will focus is entirely new and a blank canvas, or if it already has elements in place. In this early process of understanding the space, we are already beginning to think about the innovation.
Staying Loose
There are two descriptors that I remember from earlier in life, which seemed odd at the time, but, in later life, I realized are stunningly accurate. The first is that a basketball coach once remarked that, while effective, I had "a wrestler's jumpshot." He wasn't far off, as I was a shotputter and therefore had an arm motion more suited to throwing a 16lb iron ball than a 2lb leather one.
The second descriptor is that my sister, an outstanding artist, once remarked that my sketches looked like they had been drawn by "an overcaffeinated engineer on a deadline." When I had the occasion to ask her what this meant, she remarked that I was incredibly tight, that my sketches were far too formal, I was overly focused, and that physically, all of my movement was coming from the fingers instead of the wrist and arm. "You're trying to draw one perfect line instead of drawing multiple lines to find the overall composition... you need to loosen up your hand, your eyes, and your head."
We need to remember that we are sketching at this point. We can't become invested in our ideas, and we need to stay loose and sketch out spaces that interest us, then quickly evaluate what we see. Any attempts at perfection are wasted at this point, and, more importantly, make us more resistant to throwing something away and starting new if we have to.
Similar to loose sketches and composition, this is a phase of the work which can benefit from the occasional break. In its full form, critical analysis and WGB space research tends to be quite exhaustive, so make sure to take breaks and perhaps take on some small, one- or two-day projects to allow you to refresh yourself a bit. For example, if I have a very tight, detail-oriented project, I will take on something iterative and loose... and vice versa.
Understanding the Space for Ourselves
To refresh ourselves, our goals specifically for this Lesson are to:
- frame the importance of "expanding from center" to create sustainability-driven innovation, strategic integration, and brand equity;
- articulate White, Gray, and Black space and how each can be of strategic interest;
- deconstruct sustainability strategies and Corporate Sustainability Reports into White, Gray, and Black areas for innovation;
- conduct research to gain detailed understandings of White, Gray, and Black spaces.
To this end, this week's Case is designed to accomplish two things: 1) to allow us to identify and research WGB spaces for ourselves, and 2) to encourage us to keep ourselves loose while we are in the sketching phases of our work.