Insomnia

I was reading this article about the shocking steps that General Motors was taking to bootstrap their electric car project (called Volt). To allow themselves to innovate, they brought back a senior engineer from Germany and they threw all their processes out the window. The rest of the article describes how they peeled-off the industry's assumptions about car making (in general) and electric cars (in particular).

To me, one of the most interesting things that this article is the fact that they eventually realized that they cannot afford to just keep up with the Japanese car companies. They cannot play it safe. They had to "leapfrog" the competition and force them to follow their lead. This is the only way they could regain the technological edge.

The Volt is not available to customers yet. And it might still be a while before it is; But, according to the article, other car makers are already using the Volt's "technology" to design a new generation of electric cars. Even if the Volt never becomes a commercial success, the strategy already paid off for GM as it re-established them as innovators in their industry.

Labels: design, work

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