Author Archive for mark@movementdesign.org

Shai Agassi To Forge Israeli Electric Car Network

Published
by
mark@movementdesign.org
on January 23, 2008
in Europe, IT, SAP, Uncategorized, automotive, electrics, energy, sustainability and transportation
. 0 Comments

projbplace.jpg

So ex-SAP executive Shai Agassi’s Project Better Place has managed to pull it off. Former product chief Shai catapulted coolly into DLD in Munich yesterday straight from Jerusalem, where he had launched one of the most curious deals the auto industry has ever seen. He drove out that afternoon. To Davos.

Alongside Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Renault / Nissan’s CEO Carlos Ghosn, Agassi announced, a spectacular and audacious agreement on Monday to deploy a new kind of electric power network and set of cars to run on them that will get Israel’s car drivers off oil as quickly as possible. It’s consistent delivery on his October deal, when he raised $200 million from Israeli Corp and VantagePoint Venture Partners.

Shai and I spent thirty minutes talking yesterday in Munich and what I heard proved to be true. On stage, Agassi is a brilliant presenter, dashing, focused, witty and strident. He’s up there with Al Gore in getting you by the throat and implying “talking about this isn’t enough!” and stood shoulders above the impressive line up the crushed and seat-deprived attendees of Burda Media’s DLD event had seen.

Project Better Place will integrate and deploy a new product, sales and support channel (read ‘charging’ stations) that will allow Israeli consumers to drive their own pure electric (not hybrid) car that has a 200km or so range. It will feature a new design of battery that can be swapped in and out in about the time it takes right now to fill up a car with gasoline. People will be able to do so at a country-wide network of swapping stations, or charge cars via power points. The cars will be designed and built by Renault / Nissan. Agassi says it will reduce oil use in Israel drastically - we’re talking figures like 50 per cent here.

The capital to get this going has come from a group of investors that includes Israeli Corporation (which right now supplies Israel with oil - proving, as with Abu Dhabi’s latest moves - that oil money can sometimes turn green) and also features VantagePoint Venture Partners, blessed right now with this shining star to distract everyone from the mess at Tesla. Agassi claims the system will launch within four years.

One of the big features of the system is that electric power will be sold as packages akin to the way that mobile phones are sold today - there will be multiple plans you can buy, including one that says if you buy about six years of power, they’ll throw in the car for free.

agassi.jpg

But can he really pull it off? Agassi has got to this situation incredibly quickly. When I ask how in a year he has managed to leave his old job and do one of the most audacious deals imaginable he says “Nine months! It’s been nine months!”

In truth, for any entrepreneurs out there who may suddenly feel deeply inadequate, Agassi has had this process in train for three years. The journey started when he listened to a challenge by a speaker at Davos to do something to make the world a better place. Agassi admits that during those first few years “I walked every single wrong path first. I was sure for months hydrogen, then I was sure it would be ethanol.”

This characteristic of Agassi’s seems crucial to understand. You feel he’s churned the options over in his head constantly and worked out the answer. Now he’s settled on it, his purpose is to set that vision out to the world, do the necessary business deals to make it happen and then…”. Actually, “and then?” is a fairly good question and there isn’t right now a lot of substance to see, beyond the deal itself. Be in no doubt that Project Better Place now needs to ‘execute’, as IT guys would say. They’ll need some very talented people, they’ll need to ensure that Renault / Nissan and other partners such as battery provider NEC deliver technologies, and integrate those technologies together, on time. They will also need to work out the details of the service model and sales and marketing, factors that could make or break the project. And of course if oil prices fall dramatically (admittedly unlikely) the economics become a problem.

So is the man up for it? The company website is today a lonely place, with a link to ‘leadership’ that leads to… just Agassi. There are two people photos. Him and, curiously, his young son, who is part of the Davos pitch. Yet while Agassi himself quipped on stage to the (German) DLD audience that he “used to be the next CEO of SAP”, he never was SAP’s CEO and opinions gathered from my Twittering IT analyst friends vary on just how successful his time at that firm was.

First, here’s Dennis Howlett, veteran technology and financial software analyst:

“Shai created a roadmap and at one stage was delivering a ton of product [at SAP]. “But it became indigestible for many SAPpers.”

Then over to Greenmonk’s own James Governor:

“The Agassi legacy at SAP?…. a job unfinished. He built an architecture, but it was not as widely adopted as he, or the board, wanted.” James’s other comment is curious. “Shai evidently doesn’t have a great deal of patience and is inclined to hector communities (for example, customers) that don’t do what he wants.”

What next? Well Project Better Place has a hell of a lot to do and, once Davos is over, Agassi better get together a brilliant team and start executing. Right now, you hear nothing except him. While the project talks about partnership and being open, it would seem that the big deal has for now taken priority over engaging the talent base required. The firm will need a lot of great people, and those partnerships will take a lot of managing.

What’s sure is that the world is a better place for this development. Amongst the visionaries and future talk underway at DLD, Agassi stood out as a doer.

But don’t for a minute think this is the only future for cars. Agassi’s vision has unlocked anything up to a billion dollars but there is surely more to come and many things are happening right now. Agassi is a visionary but his vision is pretty narrow.

Shai’s in Davos now, wooing the great and mighty with that vision and his audacity. For the next three years he’ll definitely be judged on that ability to ‘execute’. We wish him well.

Read on at Re*Move, where we ask Is Project Better Place the big answer?
Mark Charmer is a contributor to Greenmonk Associates. He is CEO of The Movement Design Bureau, a think tank.

Photo credits: Project Better Place.

by-sa

The future of source material. Learning to see the steps.

Published
by
mark@movementdesign.org
on September 25, 2007
in IT, open source and social software
. 1 Comment

IMG_9501_2.jpg

I’m busy helping to build Akvo at the moment, an open source wiki and set of collaboration and finance tools that pool the knowledge that already exists in different NGO and government silos, to help the world’s poorest communities quickly build water and sanitation facilities. It’s worth doing - today over 1.1 billion people are without safe drinking water and, globally, 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation. Each year, as a result, 1.8 million children die of diarrhoea and other diseases, 440 million school days are missed, and in sub-Saharan Africa alone $28.4 billion (USD) are lost in productivity and opportunity costs.

The great thing about tackling a problem this urgent is that you can challenge every aspect of how things are currently done - the assumptions that keep us constrained. What has become quickly apparent as we’ve presented the prototype and raised funds from development sector groups is that this field is wide open to act as a test-bed for our first game-changing element - that open source principles of knowledge sharing can change how development is organised. This component was surprisingly easy to explain to an NGO audience, in fact, with a panel debate at Stockholm World Water Week demonstrating a sound appreciation from relevant parties of the opportunities it presents to reduce costs and improve participation and technology re-use and longevity.

Yet underneath there is a tougher issue to deal with, and it becomes more apparent when dealing with that other movement of the moment - the opening up of knowledge systems via social media, and the tensions that creates for organisations built on hierarchical, command and control lines.

The problem is that organisations that have evolved as a hierarchy, with a clear chain of command, are not particularly effective when tasked with gathering and refining content in an emerging infrastructure shaped by social media and by processes that share every stage of a product (or story’s) development with anyone who is interested.

Because while digital material, by its nature, can be updated whenever there is a good reason to do so, it often isn’t. Instead, the vast majority of digital material today continues to be written, approved and published as if it was print material – it just happens to be made available digitally. Almost all marketing departments work this way.

And here’s where I’m going to collapse my lessons from open source and social media together. The central problem in most modern organisations is that there is no culture of shared, authentic core content. Traditional marketing and communications teams have developed stories in a linear fashion, with source material being assumed to be the final polished product, rather than the raw facts and figures. The source becomes the brochure, rather than the original interview that created insights for each section of that brochure. While technology such as wikipedia-style databases allow it, established processes of information gathering make it impossible to easily reference original source material in end products, and when that source material changes it is unusual for end products to be updated without considerable management activity.

This linear process of content creation and approval, favoured today, is designed to discard the real source content and create an improved edited reality, usually a report that is distorted to answer particular questions, or a document that tells a certain story to a certain audience. The organisation – or more accurately individual actors – try to hide any ‘weaknesses’ in the original source or make decisions along the way about which portions of the source should be published more widely and which should remain confidential. In other words, they attempt to control access to the source content. With emerging social media processes – pioneered in particular by the open source software movement – the philosophy is that the source content is open to all unless there is consensus that an individual should be excluded from either reading (unlikely) or editing (more likely) that content. The aim is to encourage all to feel they can contribute to and edit the source code – all actors are encouraged to improve the quality of the source code itself, perhaps by making connections between it and other things, or even simply by tidying it up. In all cases, what is changed can be tracked and large numbers of content editors constantly watch over changes and rigorously review and tweak material.

Yet over decades we have created organisations that usually have two parallel organisational realities - an internal organisation that is quirky, has politics, problems, secret plans, good people and bad people, versus an external organisation that is coherent, polished and near perfect.

The key beneficiary of maintaining two separate organisations is usually the marketing (or legal) department. Millions of man hours are applied globally to take real scenarios and polish them into something suitable for external consumption. Maybe its time to refocus our efforts, giving people at every level and every stage in the process of product and service development the tools and skills needed to tell their own, real stories at every stage. Doing so is no longer a technology problem - it’s a management one.

Mark Charmer is director of The Movement Design Bureau. He co-edits Re*Move and is a contributor to Greenmonk.

by-sa

Working water twice

Published
by
mark@movementdesign.org
on August 24, 2007
in Asia, sustainability, waste and water
. 0 Comments

I’ve spent the past few weeks emerged in the water sector and the opportunities that exist to tackle the problem that 1.1 billion people lack safe drinking water and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation.

There are some fascinating people out there working to overturn assumptions and find new models of collaboration. There are also some great design ideas. Check out this system, or should I say cistern, which initially looks bizarre but is actually an astonishingly simple way of improving the efficiency of flush toilets. If we make toilets more efficient, they require less infrastructure.

picture-1.png

Bill McDonough points out that to develop a strategy of change requires genuine humility. He follows on with one of my favourite quotes to use with naysayers:

“If anyone has any trouble with the concept of design humility, reflect on this: it took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage.”

Stuff like this shows how much we can redesign even the most familiar things. Thanks to Juergen Kikuyumoja Eichholz for the link.

by-sa

Water bottles of the future?

Published
by
mark@movementdesign.org
on July 25, 2007
in food, travel and water
. 2 Comments

vanbezooyen_core77_nienkevording.jpg

Forget Richard Pim’s garden wall made of wine bottles. Here’s a much more serious idea for the drinks companies like Cadbury Schweppes, Pepsi and Coca Cola - pick up on the spirit of the beautiful ideas by Dutch designer Nienke Vording and stop shipping vast quantities of bottled water around the country, which then all get chucked into landfill.

Instead, sell gorgeous reusable water bottles - indeed promote designers to create all kinds of personal reusable bottles. Then install ‘water stations’ into local shops and other locations. Offer either tapwater (still or gassed-up, either of which you pay for) or mineral water from tanks (which you pay extra for). But charge a bit less than you would for bottled water.

And don’t cheat and only distribute water from the tanks. That’s as absurd as the huge logistics operation that underpins the water cooler industry, which busily expends energy shipping water barrels into every office building in the land.

Of course, in the Greenmonk spirit of innovation from the roots up, this could be done without the support of the major drinks distributors…

by-sa

The end of America’s CO2 affair?

Published
by
mark@movementdesign.org
on June 8, 2007
in Europe, North America, ecology, energy, global warming and transportation
. 0 Comments

Getting any kind of G8 deal on climate change has been quite an achievement, based on conversations with people on the ground in Germany. And having the United States make the right noises is a true development. Fiona Harvey, in her new FT blog that will examine energy and environmental issues, sensed a shift yesterday.

“We have to wait and see what happens in Bali in December before we can make a final judgement. But progress it certainly is. George W Bush has repeatedly scorned the UN and its climate change talks in the past. This time, he says he wants the US to be “actively involved, if not taking the lead, in a post-Kyoto framework, post-Kyoto agreement”.

Of course, that could also mean the US wants to participate in order to stall agreement on a binding commitment to cut emissions, as some green groups suspect.

But even if that is the case, it still means the talks can start this year. In 2009, there will be a different president who may take the US participation in a different direction. At least the process will have begun, rather than having to be started from scratch by a new president in 2009.”

We spend a lot of time trying to sense whether America really is changing its attitudes towards climate change and the ways action can be taken. And while Bush’s policy making is one thing, it’s what the doers on the ground are up to that counts for the long term.

Dante’s Peak: Would Pierce have got everyone out in a Prius?
dantes_peak.jpg
America’s renewed lust for the environment goes much wider than the Silicon Valley clean boom. For example, an amazing number of people you talk to in the US are now very interested in finding ways to reduce their dependency on oil, for starters. And they won’t sacrifice mobility to do it. I call the latter the ‘Dante’s Peak’ trait - a hard-wired desire to have the immediate ability at any time to put your entire family into a truck that can speed you away from exploding volcanos, or whatever else might come along. Such traits just aren’t part of the European psyche, and this difference needs to be understood. Conversely, European angst over aviation emissions, a constant and major factor here, is just not on the US radar. Americans in the street can’t believe Europeans worry about aircraft emissions being a bad thing. In a vast country with completely different patterns of population density and transport infrastructure to Europe it seems hard to imagine Americans starting to wonder whether they ought to fly. Hell, they didn’t transform the world with 707s and DC-8s, only to give up the mass-scale, iconic marvel and convenience of jet travel.

The contradiction is that while we are all shocked that Bush is now facing into the environmental wind - and that the detail on what this means for citizens is bound to differ between continents - today in the United States there are examples of extraordinary state or city-level leadership on the environment, with things moving very fast. City mayors and governors far away from the Arnie-induced Californian green-boom are developing exciting policies. Take Austin in, of all places Texas. It’s becoming one of the US’s top hotspots for environmental startups. Americans understand that new markets create new energy, if you excuse the irony - energetic campuses, energetic startup firms, flows of venture funds and more.

Read more at Re*Move…

Mark Charmer is director of The Movement Design Bureau, a global think tank.

by-sa

An open perspective on global development

Published
by
mark@movementdesign.org
on May 15, 2007
in open source
. 0 Comments

Anyone trying to make sense of the opportunity to apply the principles of open source to opportunities wider than just software needs to listen to the recent series of Reith Lectures, broadcast by BBC Radio 4.

The Beeb’s curious podcast policy means that the archives are only accessible via its radio player, but right now you can grab a proper mp3 download of the final lecture, ‘global politics in a complex age’.

Here’s a taste:

“Once the problems are recognized, and the deep science is understood, it is far easier to come up with solutions, which typically require the application of new technologies at a scale to address the challenge. Those technologies exist, or can be developed. Public policies will be needed to get them into place.

Fortunately, governments will not need to do all of the heavy lifting. Individual champions of solutions can make great headway in demonstrating what needs to be done. New technologies for specific problems can be proved at a small scale and then taken to global scale. Social entrepreneurs from every sector can step forward with proposed solutions. The main role of government is stand prepared, with checkbook at hand and policy brief ready, to take working solutions to the needed scale.”

If you have time to listen to just one lecture, I’d go for lecture 3. If you’re interested in making sense of how open principles can be applied to speed up action on sustainability, or to transform the pace at which the world tackles the challenges of development, you’ll find inspiration here.

I’d also recommend dipping into Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm. It’s a bit academic (read heavy work) but the insights are worth it…

by-sa