In a January 2019 post titled Progress or Perfection – Pick One I speculated that Tesla was simply being expedient when it built the Model 3 out of what reverse engineering firm Munro and Associates described as a crazy patchwork of parts and assembly processes. My claim was that if haste makes waste, then in…
It’s easier to come up with an improvement than an entirely new thing. Most innovation techniques emphasize this and rely on it. They avoid the intimidation of the blank page by riffing on something that already exists. In this post, I explore what would happen if we did the opposite. What would happen if instead…
The post where I talk about walls and Mexico without mentioning you-know-who Earlier this month, my girlfriend I visited San Miguel de Allende in the central highlands of Mexico. The AirBNB we stayed in north of the city centre was lovely, but I will admit some trepidation walking around the neighbourhood it was in. Many…
Yogi Berra: The myth* I really didn’t say everything I said. Yogi Berra Yogi Berra was a Red Sox player who pitched a dozen no-hitters, was married to Marilyn Monroe and discovered penicillin. His bust appears on the other side of Mount Rushmore. He had a knack for memorable phrases that are just as relevant…
Heavy favourite Sumo matches are often over in seconds. The objective is to force your opponent out of the dohyo, an elevated ring. There are no weight classes and no second chances. Top division Sumo wrestlers can weigh anywhere from 300 to a staggering 600 pounds. How, then, can the smaller wrestlers hope to prevail?…
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital…
What is Maximum Plaid? Never one to shy away from his nerdy impulses, Elon Musk named the launch mode in performance model Teslas “ludicrous mode” in homage to the movie Spaceballs. Doubling down on this, he’s referring to the next more ludicrous than ludicrous mode as “maximum plaid” – another reference to Spaceballs. If you’ve…
SCAMPER is a proven idea generating technique. In this video, I am going to examine ways we can apply SCAMPER to come up with the kinds of innovation we see at Tesla.
What matters is the pace of innovation. That is the fundamental determinant of competitiveness. Elon Musk – during Tesla Q1 2018 earnings call SCAMPER In a recent post I wrote about SCAMPER, a proven idea generating technique. In this post, I am going to examine ways we can apply SCAMPER to come up with the…
Elon Musk’s electric car company Tesla is always in the news. Sometimes the company is being criticized for what on the surface looks like crazy moves. Examples include building cars in a tent, building cars like a jigsaw puzzle out of small pieces, and using cameras for self driving instead of the more typical LIDAR.…