How To Transform A Culture With Innovation
Have you ever witnessed an innovation that transforms everything in a culture?
It doesn’t happen often. Most of the time innovation improves rather than transforms. Well over 90 percent of the time, in fact.
There’s a good reason for that. Change is hard. In Myers-Briggs terms, most people in our culture (75 percent) prefer ’sensing,’ and one of the aspects of sensing is resistance to change. Incremental change, if useful, might be OK. Transformational change is painful.
It’s painful because it makes us change our behavior to accommodate the change, rather than vice versa. If we are going to subject ourselves to such change, there has to be a really good reason. Like, say, swapping horses for cars. Or TVs for radios. Or DVDs for VCRs.
This has been the primary problem with the electric car. Swapping gas cars for electric cars is painful, because it implies compromise. You can’t drive an electric car very far, so it has to be recharged frequently. And the batteries are expensive. And it takes a long time to recharge. It’s never been practical enough to be adopted by the marketplace because of how we’d have to change our behavior.
But the benefits of the electric car are huge. So it would take a serious transformational innovation effort to figure ways around all the problems associated with widespread adoption.
What we’re going to see today is how someone with a vision can apply innovation and literally transform a country. And in doing so, we’re going to examine exactly how Project Better Place redefined nature of the problem by looking at it from new perspectives, using a lot of the creativity tools we’ve posted in the Arsenal.
First, watch this video (about 20 minutes) to see just how Project Better Place is going to make Israel gasoline-free by 2020.
Direktlink zum Video auf Youtube
Shai Agassi explains how their collaborative approach tackled and solved the five major problem areas:
- Political - create a tax incentive to buy electric cars instead of gas
- Automotive - mass produce practical, high-performance, affordable cars people will want to buy
- Technology - separate the car from the battery to innovate the business model
- Support - build the network infrastructure needed to make the cars practical - recharging stations at common places for short-range driving, and battery swap stations for long-distance driving
- Capital - secure adequate venture capital funding
The resounding message I got from the video is one of urgency - Israel is desperate to divest itself of the need for oil. Their problem is real, it’s messy, and it’s pervasive. It’s in rethinking the problem that opportunities for innovation emerge. Chief amongst these is restating the core problems as social, rather than technical, problems.
And if you’ll recall, we’ve discussed how battery swapping could provide the spark needed to make electric cars practical. Ideas like this are integrated into a life-cycle solution.
So how do we use this as a how-to primer?
- When faced with a messy problem, restate it in several ways to focus on what really matters. “How do we eliminate the need for oil” becomes a series of more concrete problems, like “How do we provide a practical, affordable electric car” and “How do we build the needed support infrastructure.”
- Split the problem and solve each component separately. By splitting driving into local and long-distance, they found that the local driving problem was far easier to solve, and provided the majority of the benefits.
- Challenge assumptions. Batteries have been a problem for electric cars because everyone insists on making them analogous to gasoline cars - we fill a tank with gas at the gas station, so we assume we’ll have to recharge a battery at a recharging station. But if you challenge the assumption that the battery has to be a permanent part of the car, opportunities for innovation emerge - and in this case, eliminate the need for battery recharging altogether.
- Copy successful ideas from parallel worlds and adapt them to yours. Their new business model is liberally copied from the cell phone industry.
- Partner with those who can help make it happen. Without Project Better Place’s network infrastructure, the car and battery manufacturers wouldn’t succeed. Without political and venture capital support, the plan wouldn’t come to fruition.
In closing, I’d be remiss if I didn’t make an observation about Mr. Agassi - I’d have to guess his Myers-Briggs preference is ENTJ. The ENTJ profile - strategic thinkers, seek to transform the world, driven to create strategic plans of action - fits him to a T.
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