How Many Patents Does It Take to Reinvent the Automobile?
General Motors received more clean-energy patents in the past year than any other company, according to data released a few weeks ago. The data comes from the Clean Energy Patent Growth Index, published quarterly by the law firm Heslin Rothenberg Farley & Mesiti (which also provides data for our annual State of Green Business report). In news reports on the findings, GM officials said its patents covered “hybrid electric vehicles, fuel cells and solar energy, with a focus on improvements to current and future technologies.”
That seemed both odd and interesting. Why was this venerable car company so focused on clean energy? True, GM had recently gone through a metamorphosis (not to mention a bankruptcy), around which it released a plug-in vehicle, the Volt, and made plans to produce other greener machines. But why was it racing ahead of other car companies like Honda, Toyota, and Ford, as well as other innovative companies, such as GE, Honeywell, Panasonic, Samsung, and Toshiba — all of which had fewer clean-energy patents than GM last year?
In search of answers, I dialed up Alan Taub, Vice President, Global Research & Development for GM. “We know the world is approaching one billion vehicles, and probably sooner than anybody thought,” he began. “The question is, can we do it sustainably?”
He answered his own question. “What we need to do is re-architect the vehicle and the personal mobility experience through the technology enablers that are converging in the next decade or two so that personal mobility can continue sustainably.” We spent the next 40 minutes or so parsing what that sentence meant.
Taub walked me through the problem statement. “Imagine the automobile was invented today and we were going to propose it to, let’s say, a venture capitalist. ‘Most of the time the vehicle is going to be carrying a single person, a weight load of about 200 pounds. I’m going to be putting that person in a 3,000- to 4,000-pound vehicle. I am going to power it by a single monogamist energy source — petroleum — and 80% of that energy is going to turn into heat, not into powering the vehicle.’ I mean, when you look at it that way, is that the personal mobility machine one would create?”
Of course not. But that’s what we’ve got. So, how do you go from today’s reality to tomorrow’s — the one where “personal mobility can continue sustainably”?
Taub recited the litany of changes underway. Lightweighting materials. Onboard energy systems, such as batteries and fuel cells. Sensors and controllers that ensure vehicles don't crash into things or people. More sensors and controllers that allow cars to drive themselves at times — “autonomous driving on demand,” in industry parlance.
“The way we see it playing out, you will always be able to [manually] drive,” Taub explained, waxing on about drivers’ “emotional attachment to a vehicle.” But, he added, “There are times where even a driving enthusiast would rather be doing email instead of driving. So cars will be autonomous when you want it, but you can take over the steering wheel when you’re in the mood.”
This isn’t just some cool way to get through your email in-box while driving. Smart, autonomous cars could help alleviate gridlock, congestion, and pollution in today’s and tomorrow’s mega cities, explained Taub, by keeping cars moving more quickly at closer range while not crashing into one another, or anything else.
Not (Just) Invented Here
All of this — “reinvention of the vehicle,” as Taub puts it — demands new and improved technologies — lots of them. Hence the push for patents. But there’s a bigger story here, too, about how GM is seeking and finding the innovations it needs to achieve its vision.
Ten years ago, General Motors had just one facility, in Warren, Mich., that housed researchers in science labs. Pretty much every innovation originated in Michigan. About 5 percent of its R&D budget was spent outside the company.
Ten years later, GM has eight labs located around the world, and nearly a third of its R&D budget is spent outside the company — collaborations and strategic alliances with universities, national labs, suppliers, and countless startups. “There’s no way all the technical challenges in a revolutionary period of technology development will be done just with the brilliant scientists inside GM,” says Taub. “Much has moved to an open innovation network. It’s become a team sport where everybody from academics to suppliers are working in collaboration.”
The Future Is … When?
I asked Taub when we could expect these innovations because — let’s face it — we’ve been hearing about “the car of the future” for decades. When will these lightweight, crash-proof, self-driving, clean-running, electric vehicles be hitting the showrooms?
“The end game is a revolution,” says Taub. “But the nature of the business is that each of these technologies will be implemented in various stages across initial vehicles and then cascade to fleets. I think this future is within the 10- to 20-year timeframe. We’re not talking about 2050. We’re talking about a lot of this coming to fruition in high volume in the marketplace between 2020 and 2030.”
Is GM on the VERGE?
I then shifted gears, as it were, to address the emerging convergence of vehicle, information, building, and energy technologies that my colleagues and I have dubbed VERGE. Is GM a VERGE company — that is, is it doing business in all four technologies? Clearly, the smart cars Taub and GM envision represent a mash-up of vehicles, information, and energy technologies. So I wondered about the buildings piece. I expected Taub would explain how homes would eventually house devices for recharging electric vehicles.
That wasn’t where he went.
“I don’t’ know if you know this,” he said, “but the BTU level of the air conditioning system on your vehicle is on the order of that which you need for a 2,000-square-foot home. The reason is that cars require very fast cool-down.” Moreover, he said, most people end up spending more on the entertainment system in their car than on the one in their home, and their car seat probably costs more than their living room couch. “So is there a future where everything we put in a vehicle integrates into the living experience when you go into your home? Today, we consider them two distinct spaces.” Someday, he says, we could go that next step, where “the vehicle becomes not something you park and leave alone next to your home, but can it be integrated into the home. By the way, this has been an idea that we’ve been floating around lately.”
Which brings us back to the patents. GM’s labs have had a sixfold increase in patent filings over the past decade, says Taub. They include not just those related to advanced technology, two-thirds of which focus on energy, environmental, and safety. Some extend to the technologies that have enabled fully half of the company’s 140-odd assembly plants around the world to achieve zero-landfill status, and to other energy and environmental achievements that don’t necessarily show up in its cars.
Out-zipping Zipcar?
Finally, I asked Taub whether all of these whiz-bang technologies could actually reduce vehicle ownership and lead us to a shared-use system, the business model pioneered by Zipcar and its ilk. This, it turns out, is part of GM’s vision, too.
“We see a world where there’s ubiquitous connectivity and therefore things like sharing a vehicle where the system, which I’ll call the cloud back office, knows my calendar, knows where I want to go, and the world will be able to rent by the hour,” explained Taub. “Will the world go to shared ownership? Probably. To what extent is what we’re going to have to learn.”
But then he reverted to that waxing thing I’d already heard from him and from so many other car guys. “There is something about people’s emotional attachment to the vehicle they buy. In some sense, it’s a highly irrational purchase. Its use is maybe 15 percent of the day. Its lifetime is 12 to 15 years, though most first buyers don’t keep it that long. And yet people buy it and actually care what color it is and how it looks. So I think you’ll see a proliferation of vehicle models that will accommodate shared ownership. But personally, I suspect personal ownership will dominate for a long time.”
Maybe. But if the engineers — and the marketers — at GM and the other car makers really do their jobs, they’ll innovate their way to a world where there’ll be an emotional attachment to getting from Point A to Point B in a chic, green machine that we didn’t have to purchase, insure, maintain, park, or own.
May 2, 2011 in Business Practices, Clean Tech, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (4)
The Emergence of VERGE
This week, GreenBiz Group is unveiling a new initiative called VERGE, focusing on the convergence of four technology sectors: vehicles, information, buildings, and energy. It represents an exciting new dimension for us, and I’m pleased to share the vision and the plan.
Over the past few years, I’ve been watching — and speaking about — this convergence, and its potential for business, society, and the environment. VERGE is about an interconnected world, in which this technological mash-up yields a diverse array of products and services that aren’t just greener — with potentially dramatic reductions in energy, water, and materials use as well as in waste and emissions — but also better.
We’ve witnessed other such technological mash-ups in recent years. In fact, most of us now carry around the fruits of the convergence of computers, telephony, media and commerce. It’s called a smartphone. And its emergence not only has transformed the technologies that underlie these products, and the companies that make them, but also all of us who use them.
VERGE has this potential, in spades. Relative to smartphone technologies, VERGE technologies are far more capital intensive — energy plants, vehicles, and buildings. The product cycles — the amount of time it takes to go from concept to market — is years longer than most IT products and services. And their life-cycle — their time in productive use — can range from a decade (for a car) to a century (for a building). Because they are infrastructural, expensive, and long-lasting, their convergence, while slower in coming, will potentially transform how we live, work, shop, travel, and play.
To help define and accelerate the VERGE opportunity, we’ll be convening three high-level roundtables on three continents. On June 21 and 22, we’ll follow the sun, with consecutive events held in Shanghai (hosted by Rob Watson), London (hosted by Marc Gunther), and San Francisco (hosted by me). Our lead sponsors for the events include Autodesk, IBM, PwC, and SAP.
The events will be livecast in local times, starting with Shanghai and London on the 21st, culminating in a full-day virtual event on the 22nd, hosted in San Francisco. (More in the coming weeks on participating in the virtual event.)
At these invitation-only events, we’ll be assembling executives, policy makers, and thought leaders to bring to light the vision of VERGE in their respective organizations, the products and initiatives already underway, and the pathways to success. We will address the barriers participants face — for example, a lack of policy, industry standards, or customer demand — and how they might be overcome. By the time the sun sets in San Francisco on June 22, we hope to have a roadmap, or at least the milestones for one.
What’s struck us over the past year that we’ve been envisioning and designing these events are the companies that, implicitly or explicitly, already hold the VERGE vision. Indeed, it seems there are dozens of large companies, and hundreds more smaller ones, that are in the middle of a revolution not all of them yet clearly see. We hope to change that.
As we’ve begun to assess the VERGE market space, we’re also struck by how many companies already are playing in all four of these technologies — companies as diverse as 3M, Autodesk, Best Buy, Cisco, Eaton, GE, Google, Honda, IBM, Johnson Controls, and Schneider Electric. And many, many more are in three of the four technologies. Of course, this doesn’t consider the hundreds — thousands? — of startups. And many more VERGE companies yet to be born.
Many of these companies are, or soon will be, finding themselves in new business sectors, sometimes far afield from their original areas of core competence. We’ve already seen this in the IT revolution (Apple as music seller; Amazon as book publisher; Google as travel agent). So, too, in VERGE world: Microsoft as energy-management company; Boeing as solar company; Best Buy as EV renter). As the landscape shifts, the technologies mature, and the end-user applications grow, this blurring of traditional boundaries will accelerate.
All of this represents the first steps in what we anticipate will be a long and exciting journey to elevate the world of VERGE. I’ll look forward to bringing you more information in the coming weeks on what we’re doing and how to participate.
April 18, 2011 in Clean Tech, Climate Change, Trendwatching | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (2)
Clean Tech’s First Decade
Ten years ago, Ron Pernick and I started a company to help companies, public agencies, and investors better understand and tap into the emerging world of clean technology. This week, that company, Clean Edge, published its 10th annual assessment of the clean-tech marketplace, so it seems an appropriate time to step back and take a broader look.
At the time Clean Edge was born, the term “clean tech” was nascent. As Ron explains: “Clean tech was virtually unknown in the mass media, in business circles, and among politicians. At the time, there was one clean-tech institute in India and the United Nations used the term sporadically, but decided, in a move that only a bureaucrat could love, to use the term ‘environmentally sound technologies’ or ESTs, instead.”
In April 2001, Clean Edge published “Clean Tech: Profits and Potential” (download – PDF), one of the earliest efforts to define the space. We divvied the sector into four major buckets: energy, transportation, water, and materials. We made some predictions about market growth. We proffered some thoughts about what it would take for that growth to happen.
Eight months later, in January 2002, we published the first of what would be an annual assessment of the clean energy marketplace, the part of the clean-tech world that was growing most quickly. They include annual forecasts of the decade ahead, providing growth estimates for various energy technologies.
The most recent of these, Clean Energy Trends 2011, has just been released. You can download the free report here.
Looking back 10 years, some of those forecasts, however bullish, proved to be a tad sheepish. Example: We forecast in 2001 “the markets for clean energy technologies growing from less than $7 billion today to $82 billion by 2010.” The most recent Clean Edge report puts the 2010 market value of just three clean-energy technologies — biofuels, solar photovoltaics, and wind power — at $188 billion. Hey, what’s $106 billion among friends?
But the gist of what we wrote in 2001 was on the money: the political, social, and technological context for the forthcoming clean-tech boom, and the potential barriers and wildcards that could slow or accelerate the development of clean tech. The latter included government support, or lack thereof; the vagaries of economic swings; the potential for incumbent companies (and their lobbyists) to resist change — or suddenly jump in; the need for standards that would accelerate market uptake; the infrastructural changes needed to support some of these technologies; the acceptance of clean technologies by customers, both institutional buyers and individual consumers; and activists’ role in “keeping the heat on companies, governments, and others to develop and promote clean technologies.”
All of those remain critical components of a robust clean-energy future.
The clean-tech marketplace has matured, and it’s changed. A decade ago, clean technology was the domain of mostly start-up companies. A few oil companies — BP, Exxon, Shell — dabbled in solar, fuel cells, or wind power — but few other large corporations had even dipped a toe into the clean-tech waters. Today, it’s difficult to find a large company that doesn’t have a clean-tech play.
Want proof? Consider: What do the following companies have in common?
3M, Agilent, Audi, Autodesk, BASF, Best Buy, Bosch, Caterpillar, Dow Corning, Dupont, Eaton, Firestone, General Electric, IBM, Intel, ITT, Johnson Controls, Kyocera, LG, Mitsubishi, National Semiconductor, PPG, Praxair, Sanyo, Sharp, Texas Instruments, United Technologies, Waste Management, Xerox.
The answer: They’re all in the solar business — variously making materials, components, or systems to produce solar electricity; or offering services to design, manage, or sell solar energy systems to companies or consumers. (A few of these have offerings that aren’t yet in the marketplace, but soon will be.) They're not just installing panels on their roofs and selling the excess energy into the grid. They're actually in the solar business.
Not one of these companies is a traditional energy company or utility.
Solar’s just one example. Big companies are in all of the clean technologies we identified in 2001. (Of course, there also are more early-stage companies than ever before. For example, there are more than 200 VC-backed or pre-VC solar start-ups alone, according to one report.) Examples include Google's investments in Silver Spring Networks and V-Vehicle, Daimler's investment in Tesla Motors, GE's investment in A123, and Norsk Hydro's investment in Norsun. But these represent just the tip of the iceberg.
Big-company investments will accelerate. In the coming years, as more start-ups need expansion capital in order to scale, they will turn not to venture capitalists but to major corporations, with their healthy balance sheets and large cash reserves. Big companies will overtake VCs (and banks) as the leading funder of clean-tech startups.
The other major trend, of course, is the global nature of clean-tech markets. China has outpaced the U.S. and other countries as the low-cost providers of clean-tech hardware such as solar panels and wind turbines, and is becoming one of the largest markets for clean technologies, along with India, Brazil, and other growing economies. (Depending on who you ask, China is either underhyped or overhyped as a clean-tech player.) As such, the largely U.S.-centric marketplace we saw in 2001 has become truly global.
All of this is only just beginning: the scale-up of technologies, the entry of big companies, the explosion of startups, the expansion of global markets. There’s lots more to come.
And Clean Edge — which now convenes one of the industry’s leading annual clean-tech events, publishes clean-tech stock indices for Nasdaq, and produces authoritative research (some free and some not) — continues to show the way, as evidenced in this week’s 10th anniversary report. I’ve stepped back from day-to-day involvement in Clean Edge (though I remain a not-so-silent partner) and have enjoyed watching from the sidelines as the company grows in lockstep with the industry it helped define.
March 21, 2011 in Clean Tech, State of the Art | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (1)
Autodesk and the Future of Sustainable Design
If you start with the premise that many of the solutions to our global sustainability challenges require smart design and systems thinking, it doesn’t take long before you find your way to Autodesk. The 29-year-old design software company has made a series of impressive moves into the sustainability realm over the past few years. It’s one of those largely unheralded companies creating the tools used by architects, designers, manufacturers, and — most recently — cleantech entrepreneurs to produce the next generation of greener, cleaner, more efficient products.
Over the past year or so, I've had the opportunity to meet with or interview several members of Autodesk's sustainability team as well as its CEO, Carl Bass, on a number of occasions. Along the way, I have become increasingly impressed with how the company hasn’t merely expanded its offerings to help design professionals achieve sustainability goals, but has also set out to elevate the sustainability knowledge and capabilities of design students and professionals, from high schoolers to seasoned engineers.
Autodesk makes a suite of 2D and 3D design software tools commonly known as CAD, for computer-aided design. Its flagship product, AutoCAD, along with the more advanced tools that integrate with AutoCAD, is the standard design software in architecture, engineering, and construction firms; manufacturing environments, such as industrial machinery, tool and die, automotive, and consumer products; and media and entertainment companies. (Autodesk software has been used in the special effects of dozens of movies, from “Alice in Wonderland” to “X-Men.”)
Starting a few years ago, as green building grew from the margins to the mainstream, Autodesk began integrating components to help architects, engineers, and designers perform “whole building” analysis, optimize energy efficiency, even aim for carbon neutrality. It developed Building Information Modeling, or BIM, software, which allows architects, engineers, construction professionals, facility managers, and owners to break down barriers and bridge communication between design and construction teams, with the goal of optimizing buildings and creating predictable outcomes. Autodesk began using its own facilities as a living laboratory to gain real-world experience. “The idea is to use our own operations as a testing ground for prototyping new products, new features, new workflows that would serve our customers and rapidly green, in this case, existing buildings,” Emma Stewart, senior program lead for the Autodesk Sustainability Initiative, told me.
No Green Button. Those efforts created a gateway into sustainability for Autodesk that has spread beyond buildings to designing everything from products to cities.
Sarah Krasley, a product manager in Autodesk’s Manufacturing Industry Group, works with the company’s industrial customers to help embed sustainability. “We have customers in building products,” she explains. “We have customers who are designing apparel. We have customers that are designing consumer packaged goods. The myriad of sustainable design objectives across those industries is vast, and we realize that there is no green button. That is, there’s not one simple sustainability tool that you can put into a CAD system and solve everybody’s problems. So we’re doing a lot of exploration at where sustainable design comes up in the workflow, and where it’s most meaningful.”
One outcome of that exploration was a partnership announced last fall with Granta Design, a developer of materials databases, that combines Autodesk's Digital Prototyping technology with Granta's materials information technology to enable industrial designers, mechanical engineers, and others to more easily create products through sustainable design.
At the other end of the spectrum is a partnership with CDP Cities, a project of the Carbon Disclosure Project, which has worked to standardize carbon reporting and risk management. Now CDP is working to do the same with municipalities, from Beijing to New York. Autodesk partnered with CDP to standardize the software platform for how cities are tracking, managing, and reducing their carbon risk over the next 40 years, explains Stewart. “So all of a sudden, Mayor Bloomberg and his team are able to look out at New York City and understand the resource flows of energy, waste, water in a way they’ve never done before, and map that against the way sea level will rise over the next 40 years, and then make financial decisions accordingly.”
Class Acts. The city-level partnership exemplifies one of the things I find most interesting about Autodesk: It invests in educating the marketplace, seeding future customers with free or low-cost versions of its software. This isn’t unique to the sustainability space, but sustainability may be where it’s needed most. To limit sustainable design to the relatively small population of engineers, designers, and architects who already “get it” misses a vast opportunity for both the company and the planet.
Autodesk has more than 1.5 million students in its Education Community, which allows students, both undergrads and grads, to download and test-drive free software and other tools. The idea is that students learn their craft using Autodesk software and, of course, want to use it in their professional lives, too.
Those students, it seems, hadn't been learning much about sustainability in their studies. “The thing that kept coming up as we made new software innovations is that there are a lot of people who are not even familiar with the terminology around sustainable design, and are not familiar with how to take these high-level concepts and break them down into steps that are actionable,” Dawn Danby, Sustainable Design Program Manager at Autodesk, explains. “If we’re going to start building new solutions for doing all kinds of energy analysis or materials analysis, people need to understand why this stuff matters and have a context for it. We’re very aware that the hundreds of thousands of mechanical engineers every year who are being released into the marketplace are about to make very significant resource decisions.”
In response, Danby and her team last year launched the Autodesk Sustainability Workshop, a series of free online instructional videos. They’re short, clever works, produced by Free Range Graphics, the team that created Annie Leonard’s wildly popular viral video, The Story of Stuff, and its growing spinoff projects. Danby herself stars in the segment on Whole Systems Design, with sustainability education guru Jeremy Faludi leading most of the others. It’s a terrific public service and a fun way to learn, even for us non-designer types. (Autodesk also sponsored AskNature.org, a free portal for architects, designers, and engineers on bio-inspired design, produced by the Biomimicry Institute, on whose board I sit.)
Seeding the Market. And then there’s the company’s Clean Tech Partner Program, which aims to pretty much give away suites of software — about $50,000 worth — to hundreds of cleantech start-ups. Entrepreneurs submit an application, explain what they’re doing, and get a complete suite of Autodesk software for a nominal fee. The program started two years ago in the U.S., then spread to Europe and, most recently, to Japan. Again, the idea is to seed these startups with Autodesk tools, with the hopes that they’ll become paying customers as they grow.
“In the short term, [sustainability] is the most pressing problem we face as a society, and I think it's important that we do things to help solve the problem,” Autodesk CEO Carl Bass told me recently. “And I think a lot of the innovation is going to come from small companies.” Along the way, Bass has become a frequent speaker at cleantech conferences and an articulate advocate for cleantech entrepreneurs. (You can watch excerpts from an interview I did with Bass, below. I’ll be interviewing him again, onstage at the Green:Net 2011 conference in San Francisco, on April 21.)
As I said, much of these activities remain unheralded in the wider world of green business; Autodesk isn’t typically one of the companies that springs to mind when people name sustainability leaders. In some ways, that’s what I like most about Autodesk: a company that quietly is building the foundation for a sustainable future, creating tools and partnerships that are fundamentally changing the way things are designed and built. We may never see buildings or products that boast anything along the lines of “Autodesk Inside,” but in some respects, our sustainable future could well be labeled exactly that.
March 13, 2011 in Business Practices, Clean Tech | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (0)
Shanghai: A City of Two Tales
I'm writing this en route home from Shanghai, where I've spent most of the past week touring, visiting, meeting, and experiencing this Asian megacity for the first time. The occasion was Expo 2010, the world's fair situated on both sides of the Huangpu River, which runs through the center of China's largest city.
I came to Shanghai primarily for the opening of an art installation, "The Nature of Cities," on cities and biodiversity, at the Expo's United Nations pavilion. The theme of the exhibition — created and produced by Art Works for Change, the nonprofit group founded and headed by my wife, Randy Rosenberg — reflected the theme of the Expo itself: "Better City — Better Life."
That "better cities" theme pervaded the pavilions representing nearly 200 countries, plus dozens more organizations and corporations that are exhibiting here. And it aimed to signify Shanghai's emerging status in the 21st century as the "next great world city" — at least by Shanghai's own reckoning. Shanghai, like most big cities in both developed and developing economies, is a study in contrasts: on the one hand, world-class shopping, fine dining, and some of the planet's most impressive buildings; on the other, choking pollution, gridlocked traffic, and a struggling underclass. A rich and tortured history; a promising but uncertain future.
For two days, amid some of the hottest temperatures Shanghai had seen in 50 years, we toured the Expo, at times standing in long lines. The story each national pavilion told was predictable: "We're a proud people with deep traditions and care for the land that is our home. We support progress and a clean environment. We have great hope for our children. Here are a few of the things we're good at. Come visit us! Come buy our stuff!"
But not the USA pavilion, which stood out among the others, less for its design than its content: Its primary purpose was to showcase the companies that sponsored the building, a roll call of American capitalism: Alcoa, Boeing, Caterpillar, Chevron, Citi, Corning, Dell, Dow, Dupont, Fedex, GE, Goodyear, Honeywell, Intel, KFC, Marriott, Microsoft, Pepsi, Pfizer, Pizza Hut, Procter & Gamble, Visa, Walmart, and more than a dozen others.
The message, as best I heard it: "We innovate to bring great ideas to the world! We build brands that the world wants! We create opportunity! Come visit us! Come buy our stuff!"
But it wasn't the country pavilions that most interested me. On my second day at the Expo, I made a beeline for the corporate pavilions, a smaller group of grandiose buildings across the river from the Expo's main crowds. It was here I found two competing tales of our energy and transportation future.
Up first: the General Motors Pavilion — actually the SAIC-GM Pavilion, reflecting GM's partnership with the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation. The pavilion's theme: "Drive to 2030," an engaging and highly optimistic tale of where transportation can take us within the next two decades, with an emphasis on China's vehicular future. That future, says GM, is one
in which driving will be free from emissions, accidents, petroleum, and congestion. It is a future in which driving will also be more enjoyable and fashionable than ever before.
The keys to this Utopian vision are electrification and connectivity — a technological mash-up of vehicles, energy, and information, where vehicles — from traditional cars, buses, and trucks to a new generation of cool "personal urban mobility" vehicles called the EN-V (pronounced "envy") — zip along at a decent clip, kept collision-free thanks to next-gen technologies GM is developing or integrating into vehicles — or at least plans to. Oh, and the sky is always blue.
I found the vision compelling and hopeful: a car maker that gets that the future is not just about cars and trucks, or even buses and trains — but about mobility: getting where you need to go, when you need to do it, in the least taxing (personally, economically, societally, environmentally) way possible. And maybe even tap into some cool, fashionable technology along the way.
(I'll admit to a little bias: GM is a client of GreenOrder, the strategy and management consultancy with which I am affiliated. But I would have been equally laudatory of any car company that promoted such a sustainable mobility vision. GM, as it turns out, was the only car company hosting a pavilion in Shanghai.)
You might respond, "Great. Nice vision. But when will we actually see it?" After all, we've been tantalized before at world's fairs with cool tech that never came to pass. (Picturephones, anyone?) And GM's track record for delivering on change isn't that great.
"This has become very strategic to GM," David Tulauskas, GM's head of public policy in China, told me over lunch at the pavilion. He cited the growing number of places like London and Singapore that are using congestion pricing; additional cities are creating "back office" traffic management technology platforms to manage vehicle congestion. He described the emergence of Dedicated Short Range Communications standards that can keep adjacent vehicles from colliding in order to utilize roadways more efficiently ("kind of like schools of fish that never run into each other," he explains). He explained how the expansion of GM's OnStar telematics technology could provide a range of consumer-friendly services. Tulauskas also pointed out that the "new" GM has taken a more aggressive stance on innovation, such as the venture fund it recently launched to develop and invest in advanced technologies, and a more robust long-range planning process being undertaken by GM that is approaching business development from a mobility perspective, and looking more frequently outside the company for technology solutions, a far cry from the inward-looking pre-bankruptcy GM.
Of course, it's all just talk and cool prototypes. But I walked away with the sense that this old-line company has a bead on where the future is headed, and wants to be in the driver's seat, so to speak, as that future comes into view.
That was not the case at the second corporate pavilion I visited, the Oil Pavilion, presented by three of China's largest petroleum companies, though it might as well have been sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute.
There was a decidedly old-world vision offered here — a propaganda machine spewing bromides about the wonders of petroleum in our world and how much we rely on it daily. Fortune-cookie-like reminders were everywhere you looked: "Convenient traffic conditions/70% are contributed by oil," read one. "One needs 551 kg of oil for food in lifetime," read another. (I'm guessing they weren't referring to this line of petrochemicals.)
The heart of the Oil Pavilion was an impressive 4-D movie (the fourth dimension is sensation: you "experience" snakes, flies, wind, ocean spray, and more). But its central message was decidedly one-dimensional: Oil is a critical part of everything we do, and it isn't going away, so learn to love it. Even when there is mention of the need for a "low-carbon economy," it quickly and curiously follows that "oil and gas will remain predominantly." Unlike GM's forward-looking message, this industry's viewed tomorrow as a carbon-copy of today — stay the course! — hardly a hopeful vision. Suffice to say that amid the petro-carnage in the Gulf of Mexico, not to mention the Persian Gulf, the core message of the Oil Pavilion seemed to have run out of gas.
And so went the Expo's two tales. Both anticipate a growing global population of urban dwellers seeking the good life, a life that demands mobility, not to mention food and shelter and fun. Both anticipate the challenges ahead of making cities that work, ensuring they aren't paralyzed by polluted air and congested roads, but which offer ways to get where people want to go.
But only one of those is a city I hope to see. The other is a city to dread.
July 6, 2010 in Clean Tech, Climate Change, State of the Art, Sustainability | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (0)
The 'Living Principles' for Designing Our World
We've come to learn over the years that the most potent opportunities and solutions in the world of sustainable business involve design, in its broadest sense: design of products, processes, organizations, business models, systems of commerce, and more. That's a vast and noble goal, the execution of which is fraught with challenges. Not the least of those challenges is a common way to understand what sustainable design looks like.
Consider: Each of the above design opportunities are the domain of different individuals inside, and sometimes outside, of companies: industrial designers (product design), engineers (process design), human resource departments (organizational design), C-suite execs (business model design), and a company's entire value-chain (new systems of commerce). Suffice to say, these individuals and disciplines typically don't share much in the way of language, culture, operating principles, and time horizons, among other things. (That's one of the topics of our upcoming GreenBiz Innovation Forum.) Indeed, they may never even meet.
How can all of these disparate players find common cause under the banner of sustainability? What are the design principles that can accommodate all?
My friend Gaby Brink, along with a small group of collaborators, has just given us the means for doing so.
Brink, who brings a long history in communication and branding, is founder and executive creative director of the strategic creative agency Tomorrow Partners. Over the past six months or so, she collaborated with colleagues Nathalie Destandau and their team at Tomorrow to create the Living Principles community site, a Web-based portal for designers of all types that is being launched today. (Full disclosure: I am listed as one of the group's "ambassadors.")
The Living Principles were originally conceived through AIGA, the largest and oldest professional design association, on whose board Brink sits. It is intended primarily for the "creative community," but it is applicable and useful well beyond traditional designers.
At the heart of the the Living Principles is a framework that "aims to clarify the multiple, interrelated dimensions of sustainability and guide purposeful action in everyday design and business practice," according to a document Brink shared with me. It draws from "decades of collective wisdom, theory and results," weaving environmental, social, economic and cultural sustainability "into an actionable, integrated approach that can be consistently communicated to designers, business leaders, educators and the public."
As its mission states:
Drawing from decades of collective wisdom, theory and results, the Living Principles framework weaves environmental, social, economic, and cultural sustainability into an actionable, integrated approach that can be consistently communicated to designers, business leaders, educators and the public.
The framework draws from a broad spectrum of sustainability manifestos, visions, frameworks, and tools — more than 30, including The Natural Step, life-cycle analysis, Cradle to Cradle, the precautionary principle, the World Economic Forum, LEED, and biomimicry. The result is a four-legged stool of sustainability "streams." Yes, that's four legs, one appendage more than the three-legged, triple-bottom-line version common to sustainability frameworks, which typically consider economics, environment, and social impacts. The Living Principles adds a fourth: culture — "actions and issues that affect how communities manifest identity, preserve and cultivate traditions, and develop belief systems and commonly accepted values."
"Design professions are going through a paradigm shift towards more human-centered design and sustainable development," Brink told me recently. "When looking at the broad creative community, we recognized that designers need a roadmap for assuming these new roles. The Living Principles aim to clarify the multiple and interrelated dimensions of sustainability and make them actionable in everyday practice, considering both the intended and unintended consequences design decisions have on the environment, on society, the economy and on culture."
To help make that happen, the new website includes articles, blogs, and a vast assortment of tools: the context for sustainable design, a glossary, books, films, websites, and educational resources. Whether or not you are directly involved with design, I encourage you to explore its many offerings.
I asked Brink about that fourth stream — culture — and why it was included. "At its core, sustainability is about people," she said. "It's about human rights, human behavior, most importantly, about human aspirations. What will happen if the billion people coming into the middle class in emerging economies adopt our western lifestyle of excess? We need to redefine the very definition of prosperity for them so they can improve their livelihoods and enjoy themselves on this planet without putting more pressure on already stressed resources. And we need to look to cultures that don't define success by growth to realign our own aspirations."
She concluded: "Design is a powerful agent in shaping culture everywhere. It enables impact at the largest scale, which is what we need."
I'm pretty certain that the Living Principles can help.
June 24, 2010 in Business Practices, Clean Tech, State of the Art | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (5)
When It Comes to Cars, ICE Is Still Hot
If you were to believe the mainstream media, the future of transportation is electric. And so it seems: In the coming year or two, we'll see a parade of electric vehicles (EVs), hybrid-electric vehicles (HEVs), plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), and extended-range electric vehicles (EREVs) — and probably a few variations on those themes — all of which employ kilowatts where gasoline once reigned. They're coming from both the world's biggest car companies and some of the smallest.
But the conventional gas-powered internal combustion engine (ICE) won't be going away any time soon. While the spotlight belongs to electricity, off in the shadows the auto industry remains in high gear to ensure that the century-old ICE technology doesn't go the way of the buggy whip.
There's good reason: Even the more optimistic estimates put sales of all of types of EVs at only 20 percent of the U.S. market by 2020. That's a good start, but it leaves millions of new car sales employing ICE technology, not to mention nearly a billion ICE-power cars already on the roads, hundreds of millions of which will still be on the road a decade from now.
As a result, the world's major car companies, in both collaboration and competition with dozens of Fortune 500 companies and startups, are turning up the heat on ICE technology, seeking to improve the fuel and greenhouse gas performance of both new and existing vehicles.
The fortunes of some of these firms rose last week when the Obama administration set new greenhouse-gas emissions standards for automobiles and light trucks, a long-awaited and much-needed move to prod the U.S. transportation system in the right direction. The first-ever national greenhouse gas emissions standards "will significantly increase the fuel economy of all new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States," according to the U.S. Department of Transportation and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which jointly issued the standard.
Of course, the big automakers, not to mention the rest of the free-market crowd, viewed the standards as a needlessly expensive, technologically infeasible, and counterproductively intrusive mandate that will crush a U.S. car industry just coming out of bankruptcy, along with the jobs that come with it. And it will raise car prices, too, though the added cost will be more than covered by fuel savings.
But improving ICE technology turns out to be not that hard, technologically speaking. And much of the technology already has been invented, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out last week, referring to "a number of more mundane solutions to reduce fuel consumption of vehicles that look and operate like cars now."
Among some of the incremental solutions: more-efficient tires, low-friction engine lubricants and added gears. Auto makers also will use technology to build four-cylinder motors that can deliver the power of six-cylinder engines and replace V-8 motors with more efficient six-cylinder versions. More use of turbocharging allows for reduced engine size while maintaining performance.
There's no shortage of companies working on these things. A January report on the topic by analysts at the financial services firm Robert W. Baird & Co. listed some of the products and technologies that can improve internal-combustion engines, along with estimates of their benefits. They include diesel (30% to 35% potential fuel-efficiency improvement), turbocharging (7% to 8%), direct injection (11% to 13%), cylinder deactivation (6% to 8%), variable valve timing (4% to 6%), continuously variable transmission (5% to 7%), automated manual transmission (5% to 15%), stop-start ("micro-hybrid") technology (7% to 9%), and low-resistance tires (1% to 2%). Many of these are in the market, or close to it. Behind these are still other technologies, says Baird, with exotic names like "homogenous charge compression ignition" and "advanced torque transfer technologies," each of which brings further improvements.
Put several of these together — and throw in some lightweighting, thanks to advanced carbon-fiber materials — and suddenly, Obama's new standard — fuel economy of 2016 model cars about 34 percent better than last year's models — seems like a relatively low bar.
Such technologies represent a significant business opportunity for the auto industry's biggest suppliers — companies like BorgWarner, Eaton, Johnson Controls, Navistar, TRW, and Visteon — as well as dozens of startups — firms with a far, far lower profile than electric-vehicle darlings like Tesla and Better Place, among them Achates Power, EcoMotors International, Pulstar, Fallbrook Technologies, Transonic Combustion, and Zajac Motors.
And then there's the question of what to do with the current stock of cars on the road. Is there a way to retrofit them with enhanced technologies, or to convert them to hybrids, plug-ins, or other EV technologies?
Felix Kramer believes there is. The founder of the California Cars Initiative, better known as CalCars.org, last year launched an initiative "to 'fix' a large fraction of the 250 million U.S. vehicles and 900 million globally to run partly or fully on electricity, thereby gaining millions of cleaner, more efficient vehicles that are cheaper to drive, while creating many jobs and providing new revenue streams to automakers from vehicles they've already sold."
Kramer and his team point to a a dozen or so companies and organizations already in the process of converting ICE cars to hybrids, including ALTe, Bright Automotive, ElectraDrive, Linc Volt, and Poulsen Hybrid. It's a market that's scarcely tapped, with blue-sky potential — literally and figuratively.
What will it take to turn this potential into real business — and jobs? It won't likely happen through individual consumer purchases of these upgrades. More likely will be fleet buyers — the thousands of government agencies, taxi companies, rental car companies, and corporations that own hundreds or thousands of vehicles — that will create a demand for ICE upgrades and retrofits. (My colleague, Tilde Herrera, recently reported on the billions in fuel savings fleet buyers will enjoy from the new Obama emissions standard.) But what will motivate them? Tax incentives? High gas prices? A price on carbon? Public pressure?
Another key challenge is how to accelerate the pace of innovation in the design of new cars, shortening the long product cycles now typical of the major car companies, thereby allowing more rapid adoption of new technologies. The Chevy Volt, for example, an EREV that will be in the market this fall, was first unveiled in late 2006 and formally announced in early 2007. Assuming its conception goes back at least a year earlier, that suggests the Volt took fully half-a decade to get to market. Even then, Chevy plans to make only about 10,000 of them in the first model year. How can tomorrow's cars get to market in half that time?
That will be a challenge for car makers going forward: creating scale and speed. We know how to make cars, even green cars, accelerate wicked fast. The next hurdle will be to bring new, clean technologies to market at similarly impressive 0-to-60 speeds.
Of course, all of this addresses only automobile technology — the nature of the vehicles themselves. That omits the larger picture — the notion of buying mobility services, as opposed to owning vehicles. There's vast opportunity for innovation in business models that provide alternatives to owning vehicles in the first place.
Until entrepreneurs and big companies focus their sights on that part of the transportation picture, all these techno-fixes will drive us to making good time going in the wrong direction.
April 4, 2010 in Clean Tech, Climate Change, Money Matters, State of the Art | Permalink | Save This Page | Comments (12)
