Matter/Anti-Matter

You are familiar with Zen koans like "What is the sound of one hand clapping?". They are designed to open up consciousness with paradoxical or impossible questions. Well here's one: Can we have an economy that is not so dependent on rampant consumer spending?

After 9/11, Bush's solution was to exhort consumers to spend more as the way to propel ourselves out of the downturn. Today we are hearing similar advice.

Problem is, people are saving (or at least not spending, which I don't think is quite the same thing) rather than spending.

According to a report on radio show Marketplace, this is causing serious problems. On the heels of yesterday's announcement that Macy's is laying off thousands of workers:

Chalk the Macy's announcement up to a number out from the Commerce Department. Consumer spending fell for the sixth straight month in December. See, the financial crisis has convinced Americans to try something a little different -- it's called saving. But now this sudden attack of thrift is having dire economic consequences.

As Marketplace's Steve Henn tells us, the worst part is that it could be habit forming.

STEVE HENN: It's good to save some money. But when everyone starts saving at the same time, it can be an economic disaster. Goods pile up on store shelves, companies cut back on production and lay off workers. Then consumers pull back even more.

[...]

Greg McBride at Bankrate.com says the unemployment rate is only 7 percent, however . . .

GREG MCBRIDE: The other 93 percent think they might be next.

Economically secure consumers should be buying more. But McBride says fear is a powerful thing. It quickly changes economic behavior and might even break America's shopping habit.

I actually have great faith in the resiliency of the American shopping habit - despite downturns it has continued ever upward. But that's not necessarily a good thing. The past decade of consumer spending was unsustainable in two ways:

• We were spending beyond our means, on credit and using inflated house prices and equity
• We were (and continue) to buy at a rate unsustainable for the planet. The US is 5% of the world's population but consumers 25% of its resources. The domino effect is that China and others produce massive quantities of stuff for us in the US, which feeds their economies, their resource usage, their environmental impacts

Neither of these can be put back in place as we re-tool the economy. We need to figure out a way to have a large economy (nationally and globally) that does not rely on us buying more than we can afford, and making more than the planet can supply.

No answers here right this second. We need to all put our thinking caps on.

Craig Venter, who led the charge to decypher human DNA, is now on the green hunt. According to Treehugger he's looking for a double-wammy: take CO2 in the atmosphere and convert it into fuel (rather than fuel creating CO2 as is mostly the case today).

As we've described before, Venter's overarching goal is to produce microorganisms that are able to "convert things like sugar or sunlight or carbon dioxide into fuels that people are very familiar with, like diesel fuel and gasoline," as he himself put it. These would constitute not only the fabled second- and third-generation biofuels we keep hearing about (like cellulosic ethanol and other plant biomass-derived fuels) but even so-called "fourth-generation" biofuels -- those produced directly from CO2.

Venter hopes his bugs will supplant the need for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies by making CO2 a commodity, instead of a byproduct to be disposed of. According to Venter, large, bacteria-processing fermenters, similar to those used to make beer and wine, would replace traditional refineries. He expects the first generation of his engineered bacteria to be commercially available within the next year or two years. He made it a point to stress that he and his colleagues were thinking "in terms of years, not decades."

There are some obvious concerns about releasing such organisms into the wild, nevertheless it's this kind of thinking we'll need to help move us away from the global warming brink.

This is the first in a series of interviews with innovation thought leaders. We've reached out to innovators in marketing, design, strategy, and operations -- from start-ups, small-medium sized business, Fortune 500 companies, academia, to non-profits -- and asked them to answer the same set of questions.

We're kicking the series off with Manoj Kothari, founder and managing director of Onio Design, one of the leading design and innovation consultancies in India. A graduate of IIT Bombay and the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, Manoj orchestrates trend research, strategic consulting, and design management practice at Onio. Manoj is a frequent speaker at various forums on innovation, trends, and design.

How do you define "innovation"?

It is as basic as food, clothing, and shelter in the broadest sense.

What was your most successful innovation, and how did you find it?

For a person whose profession is innovation, it is hard to point out one idea that "would change life." Every idea has its own destiny.

What is the best idea you've ever had and haven't yet executed?

To make a film on Siddhartha -- by Herman Hesse.

Which design "failure" did you learn the most from, and why?

Simple lessons on prototyping: We took some calculations for granted and prepared the whole pilot lot of metal stands to hold 20 liter water bottles. In front of the client the 100 stands gave way...

What lessons can you pass on to others from how your organization has changed to make itself more innovation-driven?

1. Never begin before sensing enough.

2. Do not judge an idea instantly. Hold it in your mind for some time.

3. Do not work only on one idea. Create a 'family' and the 'succession plan' before launching the work.

4. Never undermine the insights that may come through prototyping.

5. Detailing at the early stages is key to smooth implementation.

6. Unless the top team agrees, innovation is a headless chicken.

In your opinion, what are the biggest barriers and challenges that stand in the way of organizations becoming more innovative?

Unlimited vision is only with limited people.

Beyond your organization, who do you admire for risk-taking innovation, and what do you think makes them successful?

Vision, driven by guts and gut-feel. There are several small and big time people around.

What innovation are you still waiting for?

I wish cars could fly and reduce the traffic on the ground (especially in the context of India).

I couldn't take my dogs for a run at their usual park this weekend. Why? Because it is an estuary for the San Francisco Bay, and the Bay's water and surrounding coast is coated with a layer of thick fuel oil that leaked out of a container ship that crashed into the Bay Bridge.

Some 58,000 gallons leaked out of the gash in the side of the ship after it inexplicably hit the bridge, the worst oil spill in the region in twenty years. This is the sea-going equivalent of tapping a parking meter with your bumper while backing into a parking space I suppose. "Ooops! Silly me! Should have seen that." Except the parking meter is hundreds of feet high and thousands of feet long and has cars driving on it.

This is a casebook example of one of the downsides to our global economy and thirst for consumption. It was a Korean ship with a Chinese crew, piloting a container ship that held goods from probably numerous countries destined to be sold in stores in the US. Many of those products are undoubtedly plastic, itself an oil-based material. Most of the time we do not think that much about where the goods we buy come from, or the impact that all the travel required to bring them to us has on the environment. Events like this make it unfortunately clear.

The oil slick has extended up and down almost the entire length of the bay, fouling 40 miles of coastline and killing hundreds of animals and fish in the process, if not thousands. The impact on the fragile Bay Area ecosystem will last for many years. The oil apparently can stay tucked into nooks and crannies for years, impossible to find and remove, but killing or sickening every organism is comes in contact with.

The spill threatens ongoing migrations of thousands of sea birds, and the crab season (due to start a couple of days ago) has been postponed, idling hundreds of crab fisherman. In a little while the chinook salmon will be doing their run into the area, heading straight into now polluted waters, and herring which have been waiting outside the Golden Gate bridge will soon be coming into the bay to spawn, thus endangering themselves as well as their offspring. (More details.)

Hundreds of volunteers showed up over the weekend to help clean the beaches and clean oil off affected birds, only to be told that they could not do much except provide support services (like making bird food) because it required special training to deal with the toxic oil. Simply breathing it or getting it on your skin will cause serious illness.

Oh, and the oil spill that just occurred over the weekend in the Black Sea in Russia? Ten times as big.