Creative People Must Be Stopped (25 page)

Figure 7.3

Develop a roadmap for your intended innovations. It not only disciplines you to pay attention to the rates of development beyond your four walls but also can show you where efficiencies might be gained through selective poaching from other technology domains that may be evolving independently. The story of Kodak shows how the company's executives failed to account for the rapid rate of learning in other domains, such as personal printing, storage, imaging software, and powerful desktop computers. They also failed to see how these innovations, taken in aggregate, might change consumers' ideas about how to measure performance in cameras.

Natural Environment Constraints: Altering Landscapes

We are usually insulated from direct contact with the natural environment by layers of manmade buffering—the walls in our building or the windows in our cars. Nonetheless, we should consider the natural environment as an important facet of the context of our innovation. The natural environment is where we will locate those activities that achieve the transformation of inputs into outputs, such as a mine where rock is turned into ore, a factory where parts are turned into cars, or even a building where human expression is turned into art. To achieve the value-creating transformation, we may need resources (such as raw materials or energy), and we may need a place to direct our products and by-products of the transformation process. It can be easy to forget that our innovation activities ultimately take place within the natural environment. Unanticipated constraints may arise when we fail to consider that the number and location of places that can accommodate the full variety of our environmental needs—for example, access to energy or shelter from weather—are not uniformly distributed throughout the world.

Availability of Necessary Inputs

Any transformation process is going to require inputs. These may take the form of the energy you need to run your machines, light your auditorium, or power your servers. Obviously these inputs may not always be located exactly where you need them. Electric power, itself an amazing innovation, has largely insulated us from the need to consider power as a factor, given that its availability seems ubiquitous. However, as you may recall from the story of the A-12, the testing of the 160,000 horsepower engines had to be conducted at night because the town's electric grid could not supply enough power during the day. This is not an isolated occurrence. An aluminum recycling plant I visited in Kentucky schedules the melting operations of its electric furnaces around the local availability and price of electric power. The newly emerging electric car industry has a related constraint. Even though the electric cars will produce no “tailpipe emissions,” the power obviously has to come from somewhere; if the source is going to be an already overloaded electrical system, then the cost of upgrading the system should be accounted for in considerations of the viability of the innovation and the likelihood of adoption.

Although the distribution of electric power may be even more tightly bound by industry constraints than by those of nature, the production of that power is clearly dominated by environmental constraints. Effective locations for wind farms, for example, depend on global weather patterns for their ability to produce power. Meanwhile, nuclear and other large-scale power plants are built at sites near rivers or large bodies of water as a direct result of the cooling needs of the plants. Ironically, though we would like to put them in deserts where there is plenty of sunlight, a large-scale solar farm can require over a billion gallons of water per year for operation.

Besides power, an innovation may need raw materials as inputs, and our ability to transport them to our preferred location may need to be considered as well.

Suitable Site for Transformation

As just discussed, the siting of power plants near bodies of water is driven by input constraints. We will also need to consider the availability of sites suitable for hosting the transformation operations inherent in our innovations. Such issues as weather, humidity, temperature, and even ground stability may affect our ability to generate value in the way we intend. Some activities can be sufficiently buffered from the natural environment by manufactured landscapes—for example, by housing them in built structures. Other transformation activities need to be relatively exposed, as in mining. Though we may try to buffer the activities from the environment, the effort is never fully successful. And sometimes we may not want to buffer them: it is probably obvious to you that more convertible cars are sold in areas with more sunshine and less rain than in others.

We should also classify the biological hosts of our innovations as highly constrained transformation sites as well. Because all forms of life are hard to sustain relative to the ease with which they can be damaged and destroyed, the constraints of interventions in living systems can be significant, not only in larger systems like our ecosystem but also in small-scale systems like human bodies. Keeping the body alive while doing brain surgery is hard. When we further compound the difficult matter of sustaining life with the limitations of our understanding—for instance, knowing exactly what triggers the various kinds of cancers or causes Alzheimer's—the difficulty of innovating within the constraints determined by biological systems becomes uncomfortably clear.

Outlets for Necessary Outputs

The transformation process is intended to create value by converting the inputs into valued outputs. However, there can be constraints inherent in both the desired products and the undesired by-products of the innovation you intend.

Consider the case of “Cowboy City,” as the town of Xintang, China, is known. Factories there make many forms of denim, including blue jeans, to the order of two hundred million garments per year. The town is situated near sources of power and water that are used in the dyeing and sewing operations, and it has convenient access to transportation in the form of a navigable river that ultimately flows into the South China Sea. This allows the factories to get their desirable output in the form of denim clothing to the foreign markets they serve using the cheapest form of transportation available. Clearly, a number of important constraints have been overcome by the choice of this locale, as evidenced by the thousands of denim factories that have located there.

Although the factories are situated in a way that supports the valuable part of the output (their product), they do not have a ready outlet for the inconvenient by-product. Residuals of the dyeing process in the form of soaps, bleaches, “acid washes,” and blue dye have no ready outlet except a small river that runs through the town. The dye in particular is not easily diluted, and with thousands of factories dumping it in quantity, the river actually runs blue—blue enough that you can see it on an online map (such as Google Maps) at the coordinates [23.129271,113.671975].

Living with Natural Environment Constraints

In the process of gathering inputs, transforming them, and then producing desired (and undesired) outputs, constraints of the types described can limit the universe of effective innovations. Instead of proposing strategies for
overcoming
the natural environment, I offer the following as strategies for living within constraints that can make your innovations more viable and sustainable in the long run.

Use What's Available

In his book
Out of Poverty
, Paul Polack (2008) describes the story of the development of an irrigation pump, one of many innovations his organization, International Development Enterprises, has designed for markets in the developing world. It serves as a great lesson for conforming with the constraints of the environment. The $20 pump allows farmers to irrigate their fields with up to ten times the efficiency of using buckets, the method customarily employed. The pump is human powered, which gives it the advantage of not using expensive and difficult-to-obtain fuel. However, the pump also had a problem to work around concerning the efficiency of the human body. If you have ever used an old-fashioned well pump that requires you to make big arm movements up and down to draw water, you will probably realize that pumping sufficient water to irrigate a one-acre field would require the strength of Popeye, take forever, and likely destroy your arm joints in the process.

Instead, the pump was designed to use the significantly larger muscles and the more natural motions we use to walk. Using a Stairmaster-like motion of the farmer on a set of two treadles, it converts steps into a ready flow of water from an underground well. This design means that arm strength is not required and that even kids can help with the pumping. In an improvement on the original design intended for Myanmar, a group of students at the d.school at Stanford University altered the design of the treadle steps. When the steps were made from metal, the cost and transportation difficulty increased dramatically. However, a material like plastic would make repairs difficult in rural environments. They developed a solution that allowed farmers to use readily available bamboo for the treadle steps and the handholds. This local sourcing option kept the cost down, helped with transportation, and worked well for initial setup and ongoing use.

Look carefully at the locale your innovation is intended for. There may be features of the environment that are not obstacles but in fact resources that can make the innovation much more valuable.

Come in from the Wind and Rain

Whereas societal regulations set limits on the impact you can have on the natural environment, the environment is free to visit all manner of chaos on you. Tornadoes, earthquakes, fires, floods, hurricanes, avalanches, and other forces of nature can constrain your ability to pursue certain kinds of innovation. For example, when fabricating computer chips, the stability of the building is of critical importance, so much so that clean-rooms are often built in “buildings within the buildings” that allow them to be isolated from vibrations from the outside. Chip making is also vulnerable to power outages, as the 2011 tsunami in Japan showed when the resultant power loss rendered unsalvageable the millions of dollars of wafer material that was in process.

As you would for convertible cars, you can seek environmental fit for your innovations. I cannot help but think of the famous San Francisco sourdough bread. In addition to the particular strains of the yeast cultures in the bread, it has been suggested that the moist air around San Francisco generated by the Pacific Ocean on one side and the San Francisco Bay on the other creates a unique environment for that yeast to thrive. Although I'm sure you can get reasonably good sourdough bread anywhere in the country, it is still worth asking if you could or should move your idea to the place where it makes environmental sense.

Mimic Something That Works

The natural environment does not always have to represent something to be worked around or overcome; it can also serve as a source of inspiration for your innovations. In her book
Biomimicry
, Janine Benyus (1997) describes the art of observing and mimicking strategies that other living things have used to sustain their existence in the physical and biological world. By finding examples in the natural environment and then developing analogs to them, you can sometimes solve problems that may elude other analytic approaches.

Jay Harmon, a prolific inventor, developed a propeller based on the shape he observed in a nautilus shell. His impeller is far more efficient at moving fluids than the traditional geometric shapes that have been used for hundreds of years. According to the tenets of biomimicry, the nautilus shell's shape evolved over millions of years within an intricate set of natural forces. The particular shape of the nautilus represents the most efficient response to those forces, much as a water drop's shape is a response to the forces of gravity, water molecule attraction, and air friction, among others. Other examples of successful biomimicry abound, among them the Eastgate office building in Harare, Zimbabwe, where the architect, Mick Pearce, modeled the cooling system on those in termite mounds, with a result of using 90 percent less energy for ventilation than other buildings of similar size.

Get Smart About Your Supply Chain

One example of close work with the infrastructure of the ecosystem is the SmartWood certification system. In work with a major musical instrument manufacturer, Gibson Music, I learned about a problem it had had with the supply of hardwood used in the high-end guitars Gibson hand-makes in Nashville, Tennessee. At times the company experienced a glut of the old-growth hardwood it needed to make its guitars. Although the price was good, Gibson had limited capacity for storing and drying all it could potentially purchase. At other times, there was very little wood available, and the company risked idling the highly skilled craftspeople in its factory.

Some investigation in the rainforests of Honduras pointed to a major source of the problem. In addition to the natural constraint of weather and growth patterns, poachers would steal trees from villagers' forests and sell them discounted on the open market, creating a glut. But later, the missing trees created a potentially debilitating supply-chain issue.