Garage Innovation and a Green Future

Our collective failure to see that the current economic crisis is merely a symptom of a wider ecological crisis, fueled by our short term greed, willingness to mortgage the future and an anthropocentric (human centred) approach to resources, is the politics of the cul-de-sac. It is good that the USA is setting car emission standards and benchmarks for renewable energy supply, but one can't help feeling that this is all too little too late. A spokesman for the Obama administration recognised, on BBC last night, that it isn't enough, but stated that because George Bush refused to take action, they are some way behind and this is just reality. Whilst this may well be the political reality, the ecological reality doesn't care and is unforgiving.

It is not so much that politicians are irrelevant, they are not. Without them we cannot create and legitimise new policy tools and markets, as carbon trading illustrates perfectly. However, if we wait for politicians, we wait for innovation that is simply not forthcoming. Imagine if the world had waited for governments to organise and structure the telecoms markets from the 1980's onward. We would all still be waiting weeks for a fixed line. Only when public interest was aligned with corporate interest (profit potential) did real innovation emerge.

It is refreshing to see how companies are bringing forth new products and business models that harness the need to reduce environmental impact and improve the customer experience. These last weeks have brought us the first production electric motorcycle with credible performance abilities, whose only drawback is limited range. However, this is remarkably similar to the first mobile phones, and one suspects will evolve along a similar trajectory. Interestingly it was not brought to market by a large established manufacturer, but by an entrepreneurial inventor, backed by a Silicon Valley investment fund. Given the collapse of the traditional model of car manufacturing at such hallowed names as GM and Chrysler could a new business model of car ownership be the way forward? This is the idea of Shai Agassi, who believes it is not car technology that is the problem so much as the business model itself. He argues that adopting a model similar to mobile phone ownership, where in exchange for a contract we select a car, whose performance characteristics determine how far and what price we can travel. Such a strategy would enable the construction of re-charging points, reduce consumer capital outlay, push purchasing decisions towards small and beautiful cars and undoubtedly be based upon battery driven vehicles.

Mr. Agassi, a brilliant salesman, may, or may not, be right, but this does illustrate that giving the expression “new green deal” meaning is as much about thinking outside of the box as it is about engineering. Of all the research being offered to the car companies and other industrial giants to develop 'greener' products and services, I wonder how much of that money and effort is being allocated to rethinking the way that people work together and develop ideas. One suspects that the future of our economy and thus our ecology is to be found in the garages and notepads of middle managers across the world. Reaching those people and harnessing their talents, maybe inefficient, costly and difficult, but in the past it has brought us HP, Apple and Virgin. This time the stakes are too high not to try.

Innovative Dissent: The New Green Deal

As foreseen by Williams and Creswick (1979) and others, complexity and uncertainty are rising both in our daily lives and in business. In the latter area, many of those accorded guru status, such as Charles Handy (1990) and Henry Mintzberg (1989), are discussing a future with less order and structure, whilst the scientists Jared Diamond (2005) and James Lovelock (2007) have both made strong and well researched cases for this being a tipping point in human history. Diamond concludes that if we as a species are to avoid ecological collapse, we must change our way of thinking and challenge our cultural and economic assumptions about life.

Diamond’s (2005) studies of societal collapse illustrate that it is not so much a society’s organizing ideology that is the fundamental problem, it is more its relevance to the environment off which it feeds. As the Philosopher Andrew Dobson (1990) memorably noted;

…discussion of the respective merits of communism and capitalism is rather like rearranging the chairs on the Titanic….It makes no appreciable difference who owns the means of production if the production process itself is based on the assumption that its development need not be hindered by limits to growth.

Parekh wrote in the January 2008 edition of Resurgence that there are two drivers of our current ecological predicament. First, an “anthropocentric view of the universe. In this view humans are the crown of creation and have absolute right over nature”. Second, consumerism without limits. Together he argues, “these assumptions legitimise and drive modernity”.

However, as the Bishop of Oxford (1913) noted at the beginning of the twentieth century, the marvel of Capitalism is its ability to turn sand into gold. That is to say, that the search for opportunity and advancement allows those with vision to turn disaster and loss into order and profit, or water into wine. The challenge for the business leaders of the future, or what Handy (2004) calls “New Alchemists”, is to convert the current and very immediate threat of ecological collapse into an opportunity.

Mintzberg (1989) says managers’ power over resources and institutions mean that “no job is more vital to our society than that of the manager”. Barnard's belief that “business organizations are more effective instruments of social progress than either Church or State, partly because they were driven by the cooperation of individuals working to a common purpose rather than by authority” (Kennedy 2007) indicates that the key to a sustainable future lies in a redefinition of managers’ conceptual parameters. As Diamond (2005) puts it “ a lower impact society is the most impossible scenario for our future – except for all other conceivable scenarios”.

Mintzberg (1989)has written that adhocracy is the business model of the future, with its knowledge based, project oriented approach that shows little respect for the classical principles of management. It is characterised by its sense of mission and ability to harness intrinsic motivation, out of which revenues and products flow. Adhocracy is most often used to describe the kind of firms coming out of Silicon Valley - young, technology driven, visionary, dot-com in style, such as Google, Apple, etc. Yet The Economist, (2008) has recently noted a growing trend of the best minds migrating from the IT industry of Silicon Valley to clean technology firms. If we were to blend this model of proggressive innovation with progressive values that have dissented from the economic norm in the past, in businesses such as The John Lewis partnership, Rowntree, Cadbury's, Friends Provident, etc. then perhaps we could deliver genuine ecological integrity and maybe change the world....