A few months back, I wrote a post about the power of video as a prototyping tool.  More such videos are coming out and it's exciting to watch this tool become so powerful even as it moves into more and more hands.  Again, distributed production. 

As I said before,

Perhaps not surprisingly, effective technology development teams
embrace prototyping to design products and services.  Yet those same
engineers and scientists turn around and try to describe and sell their
ideas without designing the communication process.

The short
video, done well, not only communicates more information in 3 minutes
than a powerpoint presentation can get across in 15 minutes, but allows
for prototyping.  Express, test, cycle.

Who wouldn't rather watch a compelling 3 minute video than read through 5 online pages, or download and read a brochure?  And as broadband gets broader, and publishing tools get easier, this will push production capabilities out to the margins in ways we can't imagine yet. 

Here are some of the more interesting recent examples I've seen. Sure, these are done by professionals, but increasingly for smaller customers and means.

XPlane has made the move from graphic design to video communications tools—and using Apple's Keynote software to do it.  This video, Did You Know 4.0 (an update to earlier versions), is wonderful:

As is this compelling video by Jake Harriman, founder of Nuru International, and a Marine Corps veteran (and Stanford MBA student), describing his new social venture.  The quality of the video (and their website) demands the viewer to take the organization seriously.  

The End (Jake's Story) from Nuru International on Vimeo.

Every entrepreneur should figure out how to tell their story in this medium.

BusinessWeek recently highlighted Driptech among their “Most Intriguing Businesses.” I first met Peter Frykman when he participated in our 2008 Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy, passionate about the commercial opportunities he could envision for his new technology.

There are countless social entrepreneurs starting businesses in the developed world for customers in the developing world.  Most exceed the intentions-to-understanding ratio. Peter and Driptech had the advantage of going through Jim Patell’s Design for Extreme Affordability class at Stanford, and its focus on the user and use context, and seemed to have broken through to actual usefulness.

As BusinessWeek says

Frykman’s breakthrough was the realization that such systems didn’t
have to be made in large manufacturing facilities and then exported
abroad. Instead, they could be made with cheap plastic tubing and
compact precision lasers, even in facilities in target markets.

Driptech’s innovation includes a better drip irrigation system—cheap enough and simple enough for small-scale farmers—along with a better manufacturing process. And it’s the production process, as much as the product, that enables broad diffusion.  Manufacturing is localized and draws on low cost and globally available materials (polyethylene tubing). In BusSpeak, that means value creation is pushed to the margins of the network, to the benefit of the local and critical partners in distribution, sales, and service.

Distributed production may be the coming industrial revolution–the tools that enable small and local producers to acquire precision manufacturing capabilities.  First to produce someone else’s designs but soon enough to be able to adapt and reconfigure for their own.  Given its product and mission, Driptech could be one of the more rewarding of the early examples.

For anyone not already in IDEO's PR reach, Tim Brown's presentation at TED in July has been posted.  Tim does a great job talking about how design become a narrow profession—"a priesthood of folks in black turtlenecks and designer glasses working on small things." And in talking about how design can become something more.  

In many ways, Tim's remarks on design challenge us in the same way that Drucker challenged managers: "It's not enough to do the thing right; you need to do the right thing."

Design thinking, in this way, is becoming a powerful frame for thinking about innovation, one that focuses on the process (innovating) and not the outcome (innovation).  It's one thing to say people should "innovate" but, because innovation-as-process is so closely associated with innovation-as-outcome (eg., a revolutionary market success), such behaviors are hard to pursue. 

I once asked a class full of senior executives whether they wanted innovation. They all said yes. When I then asked whether they wanted their direct reports to spend time developing and experimenting with new ways of doing their work, they all said no.  They wanted innovation-as-outcome but not not the process.

Design thinking describes what you should do when you're innovating, but in a way that sounds more manageable and more useful.

A recent study by Consumer Energy Report on the Cash-for-Clunkers program offers some additional alternatives for how the cash might have been spent. After counting how many low-mileage SUVs and trucks were purchased through the program, Lisa Margonelli offers some other alternatives.

“For that much money, we could have
gotten a lot more,” says Lisa Margonelli, who directs the New America
Foundation’s Energy Productivity Initiative. “Consider this: Cash for
Clunkers only required a fuel economy increase of 2 mpg over the
original car, so the total mandated gas savings was about 38 million
gallons of gas. The auto companies can raise the fuel economy of cars
on the assembly line by that much at a cost of $500 per vehicle. So, we
could have given our $2.87 billion to the auto companies to upgrade 5.5
million cars by 2 mpg or more, and bought ourselves a yearly fuel
savings of 303 million gallons of gas.”

That's an 8-fold increase in annual fuel savings. Maybe not as bold as my earlier "modest proposal", but still a useful perspective on how to spend money effectively if the objective was to reduce our dependence on gasoline.

September 14 – 18, 2009 @ UC Davis

out of the lab and into the world

The one-week UC
Entrepreneurship Academy is designed for science and engineering graduate students, post-doctoral researchers and faculty who want to explore
moving their research out of the lab and into the world. Through a combination of lectures,
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potential opportunities arising from their research.


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• analyze, enhance and communicate the broader potential impact of your research
• build a business skill set for a career in industry R&D
  
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Open to science and engineering graduate students, postdocs and faculty from any university. The
one week program runs Monday through Friday at UC Davis.

"The academy has been the single most eye-opening experience in my professional
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"It is very difficult for me to get out the lab to do anything.
Taking me out of the laboratory to meet these people is the best thing
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Congress is authorizing an additional $2 billion to extend the Cash for Clunkers program, to be redirected from a program designed to support loans for green energy projects.  If the government is now looking for the most effective ways to use cash to green our economy, I offer this modest proposal.

Some background

U.S. consumers and car dealers burned through the initial $1 billion in the "Cash for Clunkers" program in this first week.  The additional $2 billion comes as a result of public outcry—273,077 consumers got in on the first deal and now there's a "run on the bank" as many more (both consumers and car dealers) are feeling left out (WSJ 8/11/09).

The Cash for Clunkers program is a political "two-fer." The original billion came from the stimulus package and was designed primarily to goose the comatose auto industry with the added benefit, however, of appearing green because the program was "designed to replace gas guzzlers
with more fuel-efficient vehicles." The additional $2 billion is coming directly out of the pocket of another stimulus program designed specifically to support green energy projects.  At this point, the congress and the administration is prioritizing its green efforts: cash for clunkers versus green energy projects. 

While the actual green benefits will not be known for several years (and much debate),  the Washington Post has a nice initial review of the issues here. Essentially, estimates put the green benefits of the Clunkers program at a savings of 7 million metric tons of carbon from 2010-2019 (about the lifetime expected, had those clunkers been kept on the streets).  In perspective, U.S. automobiles will emit 16,000 million metric tons during that same time, so congress is spending $2 billion to offset 0.04% of U.S. auto emissions. 

By comparison, the Obama Administration's proposed improvements in new automobile fuel-efficiency will offset roughly 220 million tons (a 1.3% drop): 

The new standards, covering model years 2012-2016, and ultimately
requiring an average fuel economy standard of 35.5 mpg in 2016, are
projected to save 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the life of the
program with a fuel economy gain averaging more than 5 percent per year
and a reduction of approximately 900 million metric tons in greenhouse
gas emissions. This would surpass the CAFE law passed by Congress in
2007 required an average fuel economy of 35 mpg in 2020. (White House Press Release)

A Modest Proposal

So as Congress debates the worth of increasing the fuel efficiencies of America's cars and trucks, I offer this modest proposal for how we might best spend the next billion-dollar program of Cash for Clunkers.

My proposal is based on a few simple assumptions.  The Lincoln Savings & Loan scandal of 1989 provides some useful data.  Five senators "were accused of improperly intervening in 1987 on behalf of Charles H. Keating, Jr., chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which was the target of a regulatory investigation by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB). The FHLBB subsequently backed off taking action against Lincoln." (see Keating Five).  Aside from costing the federal government $3 billion, we learned that Charles Keating had made substantial political contributions to these five senators for a total of $1.3 million dollars. 

According to MeasuringWorth.com, $1.3 million in 1989 is the equivalent of $2,257,208.87 in 2008 dollars.  Rounding up to $2.5 million suggests that the current price of a U.S. Senator's influence is approximately $500,000 (in 2008 dollars).  It's possible, given the politics of the past decade, that prices in this market have increased at a faster pace than the overall economy, so let's be conservative and set the price of influence at $1 million per Senator.  I'm going to make the (generous) assumption that Representatives cost roughly the same, though by numbers they should only cost a fourth of that. 

At 435 members of the House of Representatives, and 100 members of the Senate, that puts the total at $535 million to buy up all the influence of Congress on a particular issue.  We could assume that we only need half as much to ensure passage, but why not get everyone involved.  That increases the chance nobody will complain or whistle-blow.

So ensuring the passage of any higher fuel efficiency
standards or other energy efficiency or clean energy legislation, then, would come with a price tag of approximately half a billion dollars.  That's 1/6th of the total spent on achieving a 0.04% improvement in auto emissions for the next 10 years. 

Seems like a great bargain to me.

ADDENDUM 8/13/09

From Professor Chris Knittel, Economist and transportation expert at UC Davis:

'CLUNKERS' PROGRAM IS EXPENSIVE WAY TO CUT CARBON EMISSIONS

Additional information:
* Analysis text <http://www.ucei.berkeley.edu/&gt;
* Christopher Knittel home page <http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/knittel/&gt;

In talking with Andy Revkin of NYT (Views on Fueling an Energy Quest), I threw out an informal statistic that has been talked about on our campus regarding the number of doctoral students in science and engineering who take jobs in academia versus industry, and questioned whether their graduate training gives them the right skills to generate scientific findings that address (or can feasibily be applied to) real world problems.

So how many of the 30,000 graduating PhDs in Science and Engineering each year are going into academia?

According to a survey by the NSF, approximately 26% have secured tenure-track appointments 4-6 years after graduation.  This number is skewed by the high number of social scientists included,  If we look at engineering and the life sciences, those numbers drop, respectively, to 16% and 21%.  Approximately the same number are holding postdoctoral and research staff appointments in universities.

Assuming a reasonably steady-state situation, that would suggest that somewhere between 60-70% of graduating PhDs in the life sciences and engineering are going into jobs outside of academia.  This number jibes with a survey of graduating UC doctoral students conducted by  Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden (UC Doctoral Student Career Life Survey, 2006) that found only 36% of male and 27% of female doctoral students wanted university research positions.

Essentially, the majority of graduating PhDs in life science and engineering are pursuing jobs outside of university research labs. Their training, however, comes from those who remained.

One of the big challenges for universities over the next several decades is to prove their value in a world that has fewer resources to devote to greater social and environmental crises.

A century ago, the federal government established the land grant universities with an explicit mission of helping address real and pressing problems.  Researchers worked closely practioners (mostly farmers, as the economy was dominated by agriculture) to ensure best practices were identified and shared, and new technologies diffused rapidly where they would help.  In the time since, federally-funded research has made such industry interactions unnecessary. Research funding (and overhead) came to depend on the peer-reviewed grant process, in which scientists evaluated the value of their colleagues’s work and helped allocate research dollars across the field.

The links between the needs of society and of science weakened, and the need to train scientists to understand and work effectively with others outside the academe went away.  So here we are, with pressing social and environmental problems, and a system that has undermined science’s ability to lead in the changes we desparately need.