Is Heins’ Sight 20:20?

Posted on 05/16/2013 by will novosedlik

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

The 2013 edition of Thorsten Heins, seen at Blackberry Live this week, glowed with a well-deserved aura of  vindication.

A year ago there weren’t too many left who believed the company formerly known as RIM would make a comeback. It was starting to look like Nortel 2.0. Few could imagine anyone capable of reversing the dramatic decline of Canada’s greatest tech success story after the ignominious departure of Blackberry Brothers Lazaridis and Balsillie. RIM was on top of the world, got cocky, took its eye off the game and had the rug pulled out from under it by Apple and Android. Then from behind the curtain came the lanky Teuton. As a rookie CEO, he didn’t exactly radiate confidence. But he’s defied the odds and pulled off a solid turnaround.

In so doing, Heins has led Blackberry across the brand chasm. He’s successfully separating it from its past mistakes and dissociating it from it the memory of its founders, who may have been great engineers but had no idea how to manage a brand. The fact that they could never sort out their split (brand) personality made Heins’ decision to retire RIM in favour of Blackberry – always the more accessible of the two names – look like both a stroke of genius and a signal of common sense at the helm.

Rescuing a brand from its overweening parents, especially when it is at its most vulnerable, is a very difficult thing to do. Heins has done it, and deserves kudos for it. But there are more lessons in this brand saga. The most salient is the need for agility and flexibility in response to the speed with which empires rise and fall in the volatile global tempest called wireless. The swing from domination to dimunition can now be measured in quarters. One season it’s Blackberry on top, the next it’s Apple. Then before Apple shareholders are even finished counting up their wins, what was the world’s most valuable company for a quarter or so starts to look like a laggard amidst the rising tide of Samsung.

Brands are spoken of as long term plays. But in the turmoil of the 21st marketplace, the 20th century  brand positioning toolkit is starting to look as useful as a buggywhip in the hands of a Lamborghini driver. Time for a new set of brand management apps? wn

Photo: J.P. Moczulski for The Globe and Mail

Join the conversation! I would be very interested in your thoughts. Just click on the ‘Leave a Comment’ link in the small grey type at the end of the tags listed below.

Share
Posted in brand communications, brand metrics, marketing | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Tweeting to Win: Democracy 2.0

Posted on 05/08/2013 by will novosedlik

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Twitter is just rocking the noosphere right now. Aside from its core function as a microblogging service – or more accurately because of it – Twitter’s making all kinds of friends, both online and off. It’s reinvigorating TV (as Nielsen’s new not-so-secret weapon). It’s working shifts in customer care (taking care of customer complaints in real time).  And now it’s proving its utility in politics.

Take the example above. It was created by VoteCompass, a non-profit enterprise started by political science doctoral student Clifton van der Linden with several of his peers and professors at UofT and other universities across Canada. VoteCompass’s core product is an ‘electoral literacy application’ that tracks twitter traffic during elections to measure the strength, frequency, volume and direction of conversations. The above is a map of all the twitter transmissions associated with the hashtag #bcpoli between April 14 and May 1, the first two weeks of the current BC provincial election.

In this race, the NDP is the odds on favourite. And that’s exactly what seems to be reflected in the size of the circle they occupy in the diagram (the biggest), as well as the close proximity of all the other large white circles. The size of the circles indicates the number of times that person or organization is being retweeted; their proximity to each other reflects the volume of traffic between them.

By that measure, it’s difficult to find the incumbent premier, Christy Clark. You would have expected her circle to be one of the largest; turns out it’s one of the smallest, far away from the action, a small blue dot away out on the starboard side of the conversational galaxy. You need to enlarge the view to find her. That brands her as hopelessly out of touch in a world where, like it or not,  you need to tweet to win.

It would be interesting to see how much influence this will have on the actual outcome. Will it be a self-fulfilling prophecy? Would the outcome have been any different if we had not seen this infographic? And if so, does that undermine the integrity of the electoral process as we now know it? What do you think? wn

Join the conversation! I would be very interested in your thoughts. Just click on the ‘Leave a Comment’ link in the small grey type at the end of the tags listed below.

 

Share
Posted in customer experience, design, innovation, social media | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

In Praise of Papanek

Posted on 05/01/2013 by will novosedlik

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..


……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

If Raymond Loewy was, as some histories have called him, the father of industrial design, then Victor Papanek was most definitely its prodigal son. Loewy, the slick artificer of everything from Lucky Strikes to Lincoln Continentals, stands in stark contrast to Papanek, designer of the 9-cent dung-powered radio, the  $8.00 TV and the $6.00 fridge.

Papanek’s invective (above) against industrial design could just as easily have been levelled against advertising – and was, with vigor, as can be seen in the mental map below, with ‘Advertising’ sitting in the same circle as ‘Propaganda’, right next to ‘The Church’ (a very appropriate juxtaposition – think Mad Men meets The Borgias). In this diagram Papanek attempts to construct the psycho-social universe of consumption and its morally suspect hold on humanity. It’s hard to imagine any designers of stature talking and thinking like this today.

Papanek’s most memorable legacy was his book Design for the Real World, written in the 1970s. Focused on what he perceived to be the real needs of mankind, rather than our “evanescent wants and desires”, Papanek’s book resonated with the emerging social consciousness of the time.

What is most striking about Papanek’s vision is that it was informed by years of living and working with Inuit, Balinese and Navajo cultures. It made him just as much an anthropologist as a designer, and elicited a strong sense of compassion and empathy with peoples who had little direct experience of consumer culture, while nonetheless indirectly marginalized by it.

Loewy, on the other hand, epitomized the archetype of the designer as stylist and entrepreneurial hero. One of his most iconic projects was the 1938 design of a locomotive for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Resembling a bullet with its ‘sharknose’ and streamlined body, the PRR K4s 3768 was quintessential Art Deco. It made Loewy a star.

It also provided Papanek with damning evidence for his diatribes against the profession, for although Loewy designed the shell, he had nothing to do with what was inside it. It gave Papanek a reason to inveigh against the shallowness and superficiality of designers like Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss and Norman Bel Geddes.

Papanek’s message faded during the excessive 80s and technological 90s. The zeitgeist of the boom economies of those years cultivated little interest in either addressing basic human needs or human-centered design. Today, however, his ideas look profoundly prescient. As the need for innovation grows, so too the recognition that it requires the empathy of ethnographic research, the abductive capability of design thinking, and the rigor of business strategy. Papanek’s wisdom is what we need right now. Thankfully he left if for us to revisit and rekindle. wn

Join the conversation! I would be very interested in your thoughts. Just click on the ‘Leave a Comment’ link in the small grey type at the end of the tags listed below.




Share
Posted in creativity, customer experience, design, design thinking, innovation | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Betting on a Brand Killer

Posted on 04/12/2013 by will novosedlik

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Windsor, Ontario used to be the automotive capital of Canada. Now it’s the casino capital of Canada, its industrial past buried beneath the shadow of Caesar’s palace.

The casino was originally pitched as an economic engine that, like the internal combustion version that came before it, would provide Windsor’s merchants, club owners, restaurateurs, and publicans a surge of new business that would last as long as humanity’s irrepressible desire to dance with the one-armed bandit. Of course exactly the opposite happened: there were indeed busloads of gamblers and long line-ups at the door, but once they went in, they didn’t come out until it was time to go home, their money spent. The businesses that did thrive were the bars, attractive to kids from Detroit, where the drinking age was 21 to Ontario’s 19. That small but significant gap turned Windsor into a weekend Tijuana.

Now Toronto is weighing a casino proposal.  As urban theorist Richard Florida was quoted as saying (in an excellent column by Margaret Wente), “Casinos aren’t for cities on their way up. They’re for cities out of options. (They are) brand killers.” Having studied the phenomenon around the world, Florida asserts that they generate a lot of social costs, are a regressive form of tax and basically take money from poor people.

While it might take a lot more than a casino to hollow out Toronto’s downtown, a gambling complex on the lakefront would certainly suck the life out of the surrounding neighbourhoods and beyond. There’s something senseless about reclaiming railyards and industrial sites and transforming them into lively neighbourhoods – a process that was started 25 years ago – only to find themselves right up against a massive gaming fortress. Not only would further residential investment dry up, but one of the most densely populated areas in the city would suddenly see property values crash. It’s not hard to imagine a ripple effect across the entire downtown condoscape.

As a brand, Toronto runs the risk of being perceived as the cultural – and for parts of the downtown, economic – equivalent of a trailer park. When the cultural, financial and creative capital of English Canada bets its brand on a casino complex, it can kiss any pretension of world-class status goodbye. Because in the end, the house always wins. wn

Join the conversation! I would be very interested in your thoughts. Just click on the ‘Leave a Comment’ link in the small grey type at the end of the tags listed below.




 

 

 

Share
Posted in creativity, customer experience, design | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Post-Industrial Art School

Posted on 03/20/2013 by will novosedlik

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

This is the third in a series of posts examining the changing role of post-secondary art and design education in a world desperately in need of innovation.

In the US, design school curricula are shifting. For instance, like the Global Innovation Design program at RCA, (see previous post. “Innovation School”) graduates of the product design program at Art Center College of Design leave with a Bachelor of Science degree. Through something called the CMTEL (Color, Materials and Trends Exploration Laboratory), students are immersed in the ‘design sciences’ of human factors, manufacturing processes, human-centered research methodologies and design management. In addition to that, students can study at the Fontainebleau or Singapore campuses of INSEAD, where they collaborate with MBA students and attend graduate-level business courses in finance and marketing.

This hybridized approach to design calls into question the very notion of a ‘traditional’ design education. In most schools today (and there are literally thousands of post-secondary institutions to choose from) the curricula are still contained within the traditional silos of art and design practice.

The notion of integrating design principles into the industrial process, as expressed in the ideals of the Arts & Crafts movement in 19th century England, the Bauhaus of Weimar Germany or the Constructivists of the early Soviet Union, never really saw its full realization in more than a handful of industrial organizations. With a few exceptions, design has operated outside the walls of factories, business schools and engineering schools. But the complexity and multidisciplinary collaboration required to design products and experiences that answer today’s needs is breaking down those barriers.

If the art schools are seeking to integrate math, science and engineering into their curricula, institutions that would not be considered a traditional art school are bringing design and creativity into the lab. NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program has art students, designers from all fields, and students from other NYU programs working on rapid prototyping and interactive media design in a two-year grad program located at the Tisch School of the Arts. The program is focused on exploring the imaginative use of communications technologies.

Unconstrained by traditional disciplines, lab designers, engineers, artists, and scientists at MIT’s Media Lab work atelier-style, conducting more than 350 projects that range from neuro-engineering, to how children learn, to developing the city car of the future. While creating products like NETRA, a cellphone that can do eye exams, Funf, an open source, Android-based extensible framework for phone-based mobile sensing, MIT’s Media Lab has also produced Death and the Powers, an innovative opera scored for an ensemble of specially designed hyper-instruments, set on a first-of-its-kind robotic, animatronic stage.

Thus we have design and creativity happening in schools that would not be considered art and design schools, and science and engineering happening in schools never before associated with science programs. Will the real design school please stand up?

The common thread in all of these examples, whether they start from a science, engineering or artistic base, is the recognition that in an increasingly complex world, the key to the future is innovation. In every sphere of activity, commercial or social, old methodologies and the silos in which they operate are no match for the challenges we face. Gadgetry like NETRA and Funf could not have been created without both inductive and abductive thinking applied to the problem. And the only way to get that is to create environments where artists, designers, scientists and business can play openly, collaboratively – and seriously together. Welcome to innovation school. wn

Join the conversation! I would be very interested in your thoughts. Just click on the ‘Leave a Comment’ link in the small grey type at the end of the tags listed below.




 

Share
Posted in brand metrics | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Innovation School

Posted on 03/13/2013 by will novosedlik

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

This is the second in a series of posts examining the changing role of post-secondary art and design education in a world desperately in need of innovation.

In his seminal work Pioneers of Modern Design, Art historian Niklaus Pevsner pointed out that from an aesthetic and functional perspective the fruits of 19th Century industrial production were often dreadful attempts at mass producing items traditionally made by hand. Everything from teapots to tin ceilings was fashioned by machines, using materials and processes that were less informed and inspired by human craftsmanship than by their manufacturer’s desire for volume and profit.

This naked industrial ambition was most dramatically exposed at the Great Exhibition of 1851, held at the purpose-built Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park. Though the edifice garnered much praise as a demonstration of England’s engineering prowess, the more informed arts and crafts writers of the time were utterly repulsed by the lack of crafts-manship,  quality and aesthetics of most of the artifacts on display.

In the UK, the notion that industrial artifacts would be greatly improved by an injection of design integrity gave birth to government intervention in the form of specialized higher education. Schools like the Glasgow School of Art (founded 1845) and the Royal College of Art (founded 1837), both originally called the ‘Government School of Design’, were signs of the growing awareness that industrial artifacts did not live on steam power alone, and that something had to be done about improving their quality.

That was all more than a century ago. Now that we are living in a post-industrial world, how are these schools responding to the complexities and challenges of technological and social change? All of the above-mentioned institutions are still in existence, and to look at their prospectuses and offerings, you would think that there has never been a more exciting time to be studying design – particularly industrial design. For they not only see themselves as centers of product design excellence, but as leaders in innovation and economic transformation.

The Royal College of Art is a great example. Billing itself as the ‘world’s most influential wholly postgraduate school of design’, RCA has, in conjunction with Imperial College London, recently established a Global Innovation Design program. It is a transnational Master’s design initiative that brings together three major centers of design, culture, enterprise and industry: Europe, North America and Asia, and is a collaboration between four internationally renowned institutions: the RCA, Imperial College London, Pratt Institute in New York and Keio University in Tokyo.

The most interesting thing about this program, aside from its transnational curriculum of study, is that students graduate with a double masters: an MA from the RCA, and an MSc from Imperial College. This unique double degree recognizes that post-industrial design requires more than just creative talent, but also a grounding in science and technology. Is this hybridized curriculum the beginning of innovation school? wn

Next week: America’s post-industrial design curriculum

Image credits, top to bottom: Royal College of Art/Bentley “Bentleys of the Future” project: Design, David Seesing; pages from the catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851; architectural detail of Glasgow School of Art, architect Charles Rennie Macintosh; One Way Ticket, by Joseph Popper, an installation and film exploring the human factors of solo space travel.

Join the conversation! I would be very interested in your thoughts. Just click on the ‘Leave a Comment’ link in the small grey type at the end of the tags listed below.





Share
Posted in creativity, design, design thinking, innovation | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Saving the World, One Art School at a Time

Posted on 03/06/2013 by will novosedlik

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

This is the first in a series of posts that will examine the changing role of post-secondary art and design education in a world desperately in need of innovation.

Glancing over my last few posts, one might consider this writer an angry, critical, whiner, taking pains to shine a light on the darker side of things rather than accentuating the positive. Especially when it comes to brands, customer experience and mobility.

In one such post earlier this year, I bitched about the lamentable state of mobile innovation in Canada, judging it to be either asleep or in the toilet. To be fair, that comment was made strictly in relation to the operating triopoly, not the app developers, mobile marketers, researchers or other entrepreneurs on the bleeding edge of this century’s answer to the auto industry.

So in an effort to be positive for a change and celebrate the innovation that is happening (rather than slam the operators for not making it happen), I recently downloaded a copy of “Taking Ontario Mobile: Researched-based recommendations for how mobile technologies are part of the financially responsible solution to providing better access to services for Ontarians.”

The report was funded by Ontario’s Ministry of Economic Development & Innovation together with industry partners through the Mobile Experience Innovation Centre (MEIC), a unit of OCAD University focused on “design leadership, sector growth and integration, and innovation in mobile content, services and computing.”

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

As it turns out, if there’s any mobile innovation going on in Canada, about 40% of it is happening in Ontario, which is one reason OCAD took the initiative to do this research.

What is perhaps most salient to the reader interested in innovation is the fact that this research was done and is being done at an art school. Think about that for a moment. Most people think of art schools in the beaux arts sense: a studio space full of students making paintings, sculpture and other craft-based products. That it could be a locus of academic research into technology seems like a disconnect. Isn’t that the sort of thing that engineers do?

That is exactly the point. OCAD is working hard to position itself amongst a growing number of creative institutions –  the MIT Media Lab, NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, RISD, the Royal College of Art , AALTO University, Ryerson University and Art Center College of Design – a cluster of schools that are intentionally mashing up science with creativity, intuition with analysis and engineers with artists in an interdisciplinary environment focused on innovation.

If these post-industrial art and design programs are any indication, either the creative enterprise of the future is going to look a lot different than it has for the last 100 years, or the business of the future is going to look a lot more creative. Vive la difference. wn

Join the conversation! I would be very interested in your thoughts. Just click on the ‘Leave a Comment’ link in the small grey type at the end of the tags listed below.



 

Share
Posted in creativity, design, design thinking, innovation | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Brand Canada: Buried in Bitumen

Posted on 02/27/2013 by will novosedlik

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

If I had to craft a brand strategy for Canada right now, I’m not sure I could do it with a clear conscience.

Somewhere around 3 minutes and 43 seconds of this video, Simon Anhalt, the originator and world’s leading  practitioner of nation branding, identifies environmental leadership as one of the top three drivers of perceived value in people’s minds when they are considering visiting or moving to another country.

See the dilemma? In addition to our ignominious withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol in 2011, our rollback of environmental protections in recent omnibus bills, and our demands for doubling greenhouse gas emissions from Alberta’s oil sands by 2020, we’re looking less and less like the Canada of clean air and clear lakes and more and more like the China of dense smog and brown rivers. China’s growing investment in Alberta’s oil patch isn’t helping.

This blog has never restrained itself from commenting on the shoddy management of Canada’s brand. The danger these days is that it’s no longer just a consequence of bureaucratic ineptitude, but the product of ideological myopia. The Harper government has consciously and aggressively pursued the goal of turning Canada into a globe-straddling petrowallah.

Right now, getting Alberta’s oil to market is “economic job one”, according to ex-cabinet minister Jim Prentice and “the most critical issue facing Canada today” according to Al Monaco, CEO of Enbridge.

There are two big problems with that. One, oil’s a commodity and as such is subject to the ups and downs of price fluctuation. Thus, if we focus our economy on a single resource that is subject to price volatility, the whole economy goes down with it. And two, a focus on shipping oil means less money to invest in energy alternatives that might mitigate our single-resource dependancy or in innovation that could become a far more sustainable export than all the oil in Alberta.

As Konrad Yakabuski reminded us in a recent article, no less a mind than Mark Carney has said that real wealth is built on innovation, not raw resources. Yakabuski goes on to say “You’d think it (innovation) would be a top priority, given the vexatious characteristics of Alberta bitumen, the oil sands’ distressing environmental footprint and the Canadian industry’s growing global image problem.” Apparently not.

As a result, there’s dirt on the brand. In its rapacious zeal to label any dissenting opinion as heresy, the Canadian Conservative hegemony is not likely to remove that dirt anytime soon. If anything, it seems determined to bury the brand in bitumen. wn

Join the conversation! I would be very interested in your thoughts. Just click on the ‘Leave a Comment’ link in the small grey type at the end of the tags listed below.



 

Share
Posted in brand communications, innovation | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Brandmines

Posted on 02/21/2013 by will novosedlik

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

I got a call from someone the other day looking for a kiosk design. The client was a mining company that had recently rebranded, and wanted a display in the lobby of their field office, located a good 10 degrees latitude north of here (here meaning 44ºN). That’s way north of most of the population of Canada.

Not two weeks earlier, I was drafting a branding proposal for yet another miner. Coincidence? I’ve never talked to a mining company before about branding, so to have two conversations about it within as many weeks raised a flag.

Mining’s not on my radar, except when reading about it in a political or social context – and then it’s usually bad news. Turns out it’s bad news in finance too. Plummeting commodity prices have wreaked havoc in the category, which until recently enjoyed a long run of ‘irrational exuberance’ fueled by China’s decade-long, seemingly unstoppable growth. Everybody jumped into the investment pool and now they’re all running madly for the change rooms.

A recent article in the Globe and Mail tells the tale of woe: “Chief executives have been fired and project financing has dried up. Acquisitions that were hailed as game-changers are now derided as dumb mistakes. A once-robust pipeline of new projects is all of a sudden looking emaciated, as one mining company after another puts its ambitious growth plans on hold.” The result? Massive writedowns: $7 billion for former golden boys Barrick and Kinross, and $14 billion for Rio Tinto are but two examples.

Now that investors are skittish, acquisition funding has dried up. Junior players whose business strategy was to be purchased by larger players are having a hard time even being considered as their chastened seniors protect what capital they still have. New projects are on hold. So how does one explain the sector’s sudden interest in branding?

Compared to a shiny chunk of ore, something as intangible as a brand has historically held little allure in the eyes of miners. But now that they are struggling, a visitor kiosk next to a hole in the ground suddenly looks like a good idea.

But the mining community’s naivete around branding may backfire. Never having considered it before, they may be labouring under the illusion that brand is just about image, not substance. While they have been busy pulling ore out of the ground, others have been busy documenting their historical disregard for environment and community. They’re going to have to dig themselves out of a hole before their brands start to look good. But then digging stuff out of holes is what they’re good at, isn’t it? wn

Photos: top, Oxfordprospect Magazine; bottom, James Hodging

Join the conversation! I would be very interested in your thoughts. Just click on the ‘Leave a Comment’ link in the small grey type at the end of the tags listed below.



 

Share
Posted in brand communications, design, marketing | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

From the Tatra to the Tucker: How to Kill Innovation

Posted on 02/13/2013 by will novosedlik

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Any idea what make and year this car is? For most readers, it would be understandable if you didn’t. Unless you are an automotive engineering nerd or were born and raised in the Czech Republic, you would not know that this is a 1936 Tatra T-87, designed and produced in what was then Czechoslovakia.

Now, I’m no car nerd, but I do know innovation when I see it. This was the very first car in the world to be aerodynamically designed, or, as is said about other icons of the Art Deco era, streamlined. Aside from its aerodynamic body, it also had the first air-cooled,  rear-mounted 2.9-litre 90-degree overhead cam V8 engine, capable of speeds of up to 160 kmh (100 mph).

Looking at the front end of the automobile, you could also be forgiven if you mistook it for a Volkswagen. In fact the car’s designer, an Austrian named Hans Ledwinka, was in very close contact with Ferdinand Porsche from 1933 onwards. In the images above, the topmost is a 1933 prototype of the Tatra T-77. In the middle, an early prototype of the Volkswagen, and then its first production model of 1938 at the bottom. Connect the dots.

The story goes that Hitler had ridden in Tatras many times during political visits to Czechoslovakia in the early 30s, had met Ledwinka, and was impressed enough by the car’s advanced design that he remarked to Porsche, “This Tatra is the car for my roads.” Porsche obviously took the hint.

Ironically, after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938,  so many German officers died in Tatras from cornering too fast (they weren’t used to the heavy rear-mounted engine) that the car was dubbed Czechoslovakia’s ‘secret weapon’.

The innovative Tatra also prefigured the 1934 Chrysler Airflow (above). Apparently Ledwinka had a brother, also an engineer, who worked with the Airflow’s designer, Carl Breer. When you look at the front and back of the Airflow, the resemblance is unmistakable. But there the likeness ends. Chrysler borrowed the styling, but not the innovative engineering. Without the rear-mounted engine, the Airflow did not enjoy the same aerodynamics, or the same gas mileage. Unlike the Tatra, it broke down a lot. And the American public was not at all ready for the car’s advanced styling.  So it was a commercial flop.

That didn’t stop other car companies form adopting similar styling. The Volvo Carioca and the Toyota pictured above, both from 1936, are two great examples of automotive style without engineering substance.

Once the Germans had invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, production of the Tatra stopped. Factories were retooled to produce German tanks. The Czechs were nothing if not great engineers and tool and die makers, and the Nazis took full advantage of it.

It wasn’t until 1948 – a World War and 10 years later – that the innovations embodied in the Tatra T-series were brought back to life, this time in America with the launch of the Tucker. You can see above the sleek styling echoed that of the T-87, as did the third headlight which, like that of the Tatra before it, moved in the same direction as the car when turning. And like the Tatra, the Tucker had a rear-mounted engine.

Only 51 Tuckers were ever produced. A trumped-up stock fraud, engineering challenges and pressure from the Big Three automakers sunk the project, and many of the innovations in the car’s design did not reappear until decades later.

Ironically, when the VW Beetle came to the USA in the 50s, the massive, overwrought, heavy metal designs of the American Big Three made the ‘Bug’ look like the most innovative thing to happen to car design since the Airflow. It was a huge success, and since it was in many ways a derivative of the Tatra, you could say that the world had finally caught up with Ledwinka’s innovation of 20 years earlier, albeit in the form of a much smaller, much slower and much less dynamic vehicle.

The lesson here? The human capacity for innovation is exceeded only by our refusal to accept it. We are our own worst enemies. wn

Join the conversation! I would be very interested in your thoughts. Just click on the ‘Leave a Comment’ link in the small grey type at the end of the tags listed below.




 


Share
Posted in creativity, design, design thinking, innovation | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment