"Our customers don't want drills," the tool company CEO told his sales force. He waited a beat. "They want holes!"
In that spirit it pays to at least be aware of all the new or semi-new ideas being pursued in the hard-hit auto industry, which we may someday come to think of as the personal transportation industry.
Now, it's true that current products and business models are deeply intertwined with life as it's lived in most of the U.S., making change both difficult and difficult to predict. No use getting too carried away with any single innovation. To cite one example, Zipcar Inc., the
car-sharing leader, has a 6,500-car fleet that is minuscule by Detroit standards (not that there are many Detroit cars in it) and a proposition that, as our tough-minded auto writer Lou Whiteman observes, is not likely to spread too far beyond the densest urban areas.
On the other hand, the CEO of bankrupt General Motors Corp.
tried tweeting on Tuesday. While Whiteman wasn't overly impressed with the results of this particular exercise, the attempt at interactivity is at least a recognition that the old ways stopped working.
And maybe a hint of something more, if you agree with a piece that a couple of Bain Capital LLC consultants published in India's Economic Times in March. They talk about a
move from the push-driven system that has driven Detroit for so long to the kind of consumer-pull system pioneered by Dell Inc. (NSADAQ:DELL) and Nokia Corp. (NYSE:NOK) in technology and already embraced to some degree by non-U.S. automakers. They even suggest that a platform for trying to do this in the U.S. might be the historically customer-focused but underachieving Saturn brand, then owned by GM but soon to be sold to Penske Automotive Group Inc. (NYSE:PAG).
As it happens, Roger Penske may have
something along those very lines in mind for Saturn. Essentially, he's planning to own the customer relationship and outsource the manufacturing.
With technology, supply chains and delivery channels all in flux, ideas are breaking out all across the spectrum. At one end is the
two-seat, hydrogen-powered prototype introduced Tuesday by Riversimple in the U.K. The company didn't say when it would go commercial, but it plans to lease rather than sell, and to use an open-source production model inspired by the software industry. (To understand how that would work, however, you'll need more info than Reuters got courtesy of Sustainable Business.)
At the other end of the spectrum are the
collaborations that Renault-Nissan BV has set up with municipal authorities in Portugal and China to set up the recharging infrastructure needed for electric cars.
What does it all add up to? Well, if nothing else, maybe the creative destruction now under way is changing the industry -- whatever name you want to give it -- from a mature giant back into a set of challenges and opportunities that can attract the kinds of dreamers, tinkerers, and entrepreneurs who built it so big in the first place. -
Kenneth Klee
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