The last drop.
Posted by Kirill Bolgarov on November 9, 2007
I think nowadays the worldwide business mentality is based on fear. Fear of being outran by the competitors behind and fear of not catching up with those ahead. “Fear” “not” “outran” minus*minus=plus, right? Then why not just running forward as fast as you can, not waiting for the pursuer to bump you? All because of oil Really. I’ll try to explain my tangled logic.
Oil is something that, as we know, powers most (or all) of our needs. And we know that oil is not going to be here forever, we will run out of it sooner or later. And everyone is trying to take their barrel now, before someone else has taken it. Now imagine – we have a cheap, reliable source of power (which we actually do have, no doubt). Why struggling to get more of it if it’s practically unlimited? Better concentrate on innovating, because when the energy sources are widely available it all becomes to be about having THE BEST, not THE MOST.
My opinion – things will change fundamentally ONLY when the last drop of oil falls into a shell-branded barrel. In the meantime we best accumulate knowledge, while it’s cheap to get (and in Russia it’s still free ;)).
Innovation should be a necessity, not a need.
That is why I don’t think that the time for new business models on the web has already come – all should be synchronized, harmonized and so on…
November 13, 2007 at 5:53 pm
Hi Kirill, innovation leads to change in several ways. One is fuelled by the “last oil barrel” fear. If there is no oil left we will change, no matter what. See all “green” innovation projects that fall into that category. Typically hard to fund, until someone like Al Gore puts it high upon the agenda and creates urgency. Then there is the slow change, or evolution model. There is something out there that needs improvement, so we innovate it, evolving it into something better. Yet another way of thinking about innovation is the “disruptive” version. Often triggered by one market leader becoming too big. Small companies come with a disruptive concept or technology to which the large company has no response. This type is described by Christensen in his excellent book called “innovators dillema”. The this with this discruptive change is that it is oftend fuelled by user needs. The technology that disrupts simply addresses these needs better than the market leader does. There is always a business model thinkable that addresses user needs better than the previous one, so…….
November 13, 2007 at 6:13 pm
Probably my terminology is not genuine, that’s why some misunderstanding happens… What you called evolution-type innovation I call simply evolution, which is, in my regard, always innovative but usually too slow to compete with retrograde business dominating nowadays. Take wireless telephony and data transmition. SHouldn’t we all be already using 3g if not the retrograde mobile operators, wishing to monetize the existing licenses to the end with surrogates like edge or evdo? So I think innovative business should be much more aggressive…
What I wanted to say in my post is that until the global mentality doesn’t change from “consuming” to “innovating”, we will hardly see real changes in the world (not only tech wise or business wise). And that change will, most likely happen as a consequence of total implementation of inexhaustible power sources which (most likely again ;)) will be the consequence of oil exhaustion.