Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
We spent a couple of years with General Motors and others, confirming
that it would work and was a good idea, but then we faced the inventor's
dilemma: How do you get a thing like this on the market quickly, and well,
in high volume and quality? The normal method is to patent and auction
the intellectual property, and hope that the single buyer succeeds with it
and doesn't sit on it. But you only have one shot at success.
We thought it would be more fun to choose the open software model
and put the work prominently in the public domain, where nobody can
patent it, and get everyone fighting over it. We thought that could work
without government intervention because of two powerful market forces.
Customers want superior cars, and manufacturers want competitive advan-
tage.The competitive advantage that they get turns out to be decisive.They
get up to a tenfold decrease in the concept-to-street product cycle time, the
number of parts in the body, the assembly space and effort, and, above all,
the investment required for tooling and equipment, which is the main
source of financial risk and the main barrier to market entry.
As a result of people's going after those enticing inducements to enter
the market, by the end of 1997 about $3 billion had been committed to this
line of development by proprietary programs and several dozen firms
worldwide.About half of those firms were not automakers, but intended to
become so—for example, car parts makers, who have the automakers' capa-
bility, and the large electronics companies, who have all the capabilities
needed, except they have never made something with wheels. The skills
needed to do that can all be bought, allied with, or hired in the market
place. Any first-tier supplier will happily do it for a fee, you can badge it
however you want, and soon you have a formidable, real or virtual, Hyper-
car company.
The job of our little non-profit in this, one of ten areas we work in, is to
support these developments technically and strategically in a compartmen-
talized fashion, keeping the secrets of each company from the others, but
also in a clearly non-exclusive fashion, telling them that we are working
with all their competitors. In this way, we maximize competition among
them to encourage the others.We help in other ways as well.We were say-
ing for quite awhile, originally to much skepticism, that early models could
well start to enter the market around 1999, plus or minus a year. Skepticism
about that has evaporated, so let me give you a little report on what has
happened.
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