The medical-device industry would not exist without the sharing of brainpower between top-notch universities and world-renowned hospitals, which is why it is so concentrated in knowledge centers such as the ones we have explored in Minneapolis and Portland in the United States and leading centers in Europe, particularly Zurich, Eindhoven, Dresden, and Oulu, as well as the well-known centers in Cambridge/Boston and Silicon Valley.
If the industry is to continue on its successful trajectory, however, there are a number of important issues that must be addressed—indeed, they impact all of the focus areas we have discussed—including matters of policy, education and training, funding, infrastructure, and culture.
Chapter Five
A SMARTER WORLD
How Brainsharing Can Meet the Challenges of the Twenty-First Century
The future is being created in brainbelts and innovation zones around the world—in the ones we visited and have talked about in this book, in others we were only able to mention, and in still more that are forming but have yet to emerge—presenting us with mind-boggling opportunities, uncertainties, challenges, and questions. How will these high-capacity chips, new materials, and bioscience discoveries affect our daily lives, the way we work, and the world we live in? Will they enable human beings to function more effectively and happily throughout their lives? Will they ease some of the social strains and inequities of our societies? Will they reverse the twentieth-century exodus to the suburbs and help create better-functioning cities? Will they help mitigate the negative effects of climate change and address the challenges of the planet’s aging populations?
Many people worry that the advances in technology create as many problems as they do solutions, but it is our belief that smart products developed through brainsharing are—by the very process of how they are created—more likely to offer solutions than those created by entities working in traditional, siloed, and isolated models. That’s because many voices and disciplines are involved throughout the process, each one contributing to and counterbalancing others.
So, in this chapter, we’ll show how smart new products, services, and technologies conceived and created through sharing brainpower initiatives will help us meet many of the challenges we now face. Some of the impact we have already witnessed, and some we can reasonably speculate on. We’ll look at five key areas: housing and communities, offices and workplaces, cities and agricultural areas, the environment, and transportation. Will smart products and services solve all our twenty-first-century ills in these areas and create a utopia? Not exactly. Will they introduce new problems directly associated with the processes themselves, just as mass production methods, even while meeting important human needs, also had harmful effects on the environment and human health? Likely. But will they make great contributions to dealing with the known challenges of the twenty-first century? We believe the answer is yes.
Smart Energy and Climate Change: Consumers Become Producers
One of the greatest challenges of the twenty-first century—if not the greatest—will be to minimize our dependency on energy sources that contribute to the effects of climate change. That will only happen if homes, buildings, planes, cars, and machines become more energy efficient and we continue to use more solar, wind, biofuel, and other renewable sources while reducing their cost. These new sources will yield far greater benefits than any of these advancements could have on their own if they are combined with new energy storage technologies. From the Hudson Tech Valley to Raleigh and Portland and from Dresden to Oulu, we saw researchers and start-ups working toward the goal of more efficient use of energy and, ultimately, turning energy consumers into energy producers. On the Centennial Campus in North Carolina, for example, the Swedish-Swiss company ABB is working in a joint program with university researchers to develop elements of the smart grid; in Dresden, a group of firms is working in an EU-sponsored research program on energy-efficient chips and sensors.
In 2014, there was an unexpected but welcome sign of progress on climate change. Largely because of improved energy efficiency in the developed economies, combined with the results of greater commitment in China and other emerging economies and the increasing role of renewable energy technologies, the world saw no rise in carbon emissions (unrelated to an economic recession) for the first time.1
Improved energy efficiency, a shift from dirty coal to shale gas (at least in the United States),2 and the steadily declining cost of renewable energy sources, particularly solar panels and wind turbines, will fundamentally transform how we power our societies and the impact that our energy consumption has on the planet. Vastly more efficient LED lights, recapture of heat from server parks and heating systems, air-conditioning finely calibrated through the use of sensors and data analytics, better battery storage and distributed generation of electricity in homes and buildings—all of these advances will reduce demand. Renewable energy systems such as photovoltaic farms and wind turbine fields will add to supply as they are becoming price-competitive in many areas and are on their way to becoming a viable economic option for large-scale energy generation.
The electric grid will also need to become smarter. Increasingly, the system will be a hybrid, in which traditional users of electricity will become energy producers as well. Individual households, businesses, and even cars will generate and store energy, sometimes contributing excess energy back to the grid, sometimes purchasing energy from the grid when their own sources cannot supply enough. The use of solar roof tiles and glass windows in buildings and homes, in combination with low-cost battery storage,3 will go a long way toward this end.
It remains to be seen how quickly industrial-sized battery storage technologies will be embraced in the marketplace. General Electric built its GE Energy Storage plant in the heart of the Schenectady rustbelt where GE turbines were once made, and the company was hoping its battery business would achieve $1 billion in revenue by 2020. We visited the plant in August 2013 and met with the general manager, Prescott Logan, who was enthusiastic about the prospects for the sodium-nickel-chloride Durathon battery produced there.4 He believed it had the potential to create an important niche market, as a backup energy source for cell towers and windmills and for use in microgrids and solar-energy storage. But GE’s technology partners struggled, sales were disappointing, and production was stopped. Although some states—including California and New York—have pushed for mandates to require that solar power generation facilities be equipped with batteries with gigawatts of storage by 2022, the procurement process has been slow.
Thousands of researchers have been pursuing advances in battery technology, but breakthroughs have proved elusive. Yet-Ming Chiang, professor of material science and engineering at MIT and the chief scientist and cofounder of 24M Technologies, has taken a different approach: he has developed a simpler and cheaper process for manufacturing lithium-ion batteries, a method that will also make them sturdier and more efficient. Chiang has secured eight patents, has raised $50 million in venture capital, and has been awarded a $4.5 million grant from the Department of Energy. More than 10,000 users are testing Chiang’s invention, and he has high hopes that production will begin by 2017.5 Chiang’s company, 24M, will initially produce batteries for the smart grid but, in the longer run, has its eye on the electric vehicle market. Venkat Viswanathan, of Carnegie Mellon, believes that 24M’s innovation could disrupt battery manufacturing just as “mini-mills did to integrated steel mills.” Production time could be reduced by 80 percent and costs cut by over 50 percent, savings that would help make battery-equipped electric vehicles competitive with carbon fuel-based vehicles.6 Another development that could boost local energy production is the availability of massive batteries—the size of refrigerators—and Tesla is scaling up to produce these. According to Shell, such batteries have a promising future in regions with abundant wind or sun.7
The electric vehicle’s battery has the potential to make a significant impact on the energy grid. Between 2009 and 2012, Danish researc
hers conducted a research program called Edison, whose goal was to evaluate a variety of methods for enabling vehicles to contribute energy back to the grid (these are referred to as vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, technologies).70 A team composed of members from IBM, the Danish energy group Dong, Siemens, and the Authorities of the Island of Bornholm—an island off the coast of Denmark where the study was conducted, due to its exclusive use of renewable energy sources—sought to evaluate the potential of storing excess electricity produced by wind in the batteries of electric vehicles. Their owners would be reimbursed for supplying power back to the grid, when it was needed.
This system has not yet become operational, but it is a good example of how the electricity industry could eventually develop into a decentralized grid. The lion’s share of energy would not be produced by traditional utilities, but by a network of individual home and business consumers. They would generate electricity for their own use and also for supply to the grid. This would have revolutionary consequences for utilities, which would become system stabilizers and energy redistributors, rather than power generators. They would generate energy only when supply and demand are in need of alignment.
This emerging evolution of the market prompted the German energy producer RWE to reorganize in 2014, consolidating its traditional generation facilities into a separate holding unit and focusing the core of the company on sustainable energy production. Other utility companies will similarly have to reevaluate their missions, structures, and processes in order to survive in a world in which their consumers are also their business partners. In this new world, sensors and data analytics for optimal distribution will become even more important than the traditional centralized energy generation. In several cities in the United States and in Europe, people have organized cooperatives with the goal of making these energy initiatives as productive and successful as possible. As more and more producers join, they will have less need of the subsidies and incentives they rely on now. As these cooperatives expand and become ubiquitous—and as we become less and less dependent on carbon sources of energy—there is no doubt that energy policy, business models, and fee structures will have to change fundamentally. The communications market experienced a similar transformation when the traditional telephone network was disrupted by the advent of mobile telephony.
The Automobile: Most in Need of a Radical Redesign
A survey of the coming challenges must include the most obvious and ubiquitous of all: transportation and, specifically, the automobile. At the Aspen Ideas Festival in July 2013, Silicon Valley venture capitalist and billionaire John Doerr posed the following question to the four young industrial designers on the panel he moderated: “Which everyday technology could benefit most from a radical redesign?”
The immediate answer: the automobile.
As we learned while doing our research, the reinvention of the automobile and, indeed, the entire transport system, is a focus of activity in advanced chips and new materials research and development in brainbelts around the world—in the California labs of Google, Tesla, and Apple; at Uber, where they hired robotics scientists away from Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh; and in the research centers of automakers Mercedes, BMW, and Toyota.
For decades, car ownership has been a symbol of middle-class prosperity. But the mass production—carried out by hierarchical, siloed, megalithic, noncollaborative companies—coupled with private ownership of gas-combusting cars that expanded throughout the twentieth century has created many challenges for the twenty-first: highly congested urban areas and mind-numbing traffic jams (also deleterious to the health, according to some studies), road accidents that cause more than 1 million deaths worldwide every year, and greenhouse-gas emissions that contribute to the effects of climate change and global warming.
There is no denying the utility of the automobile as a personal transport vehicle, but neither can its problems be ignored. Only 1 percent—1 percent!—of the gasoline that goes into the fuel tank is required to transport the weight of the driver (roughly 75 percent of car owners drive alone) from point A to point B, with the remaining 99 percent providing the energy to propel the 4,000-pound steel-plastic-glass container along the road. Additionally, a car sits idle for most of its life. Even during peak use periods, such as morning and afternoon rush hours, 80 percent of the cars on the road are stationary. The impetus to radically redesign the car—and the transportation system around it—is huge and urgent.
The creation of the next-generation automobile is, without doubt, one of the industrial activities that requires brainsharing. It must involve established companies with vast resources, small companies with focused expertise, effective and engaged government entities, educational institutions with breakthrough research insights, advanced manufacturing facilities, and canny leaders who can bring all these disparate elements together into productive initiatives. And we saw just such activity at Google in Mountain View in California, and Pittsburgh; at Tesla in Palo Alto and Fremont, California; at Mercedes in Stuttgart; and in the polymer initiatives at the University of Akron.
There is no question that the next-generation vehicle will be created; it is already well on its way to becoming a reality. This should not be a great surprise. Smart technology has been making its way into cars at least since the advent of anti-lock braking systems in the early 1970s and now includes interactive dashboard displays, rear-view cameras, and GPS. Tesla,9 Mercedes, Volvo, and BMW are using a combination of GPS, radar, and sensors to perform a wide range of functions such as maintaining a fixed distance between cars, parallel parking, automatic cornering correction, and anticipatory braking for “objects”—such as cyclists and pedestrians—that the car can detect even before the driver is aware of them. Just like Google and other newcomers to the car industry, they are working closely with local universities and research centers, chip makers, and big-data crunchers.
Now comes the autonomous, or “self-driving,” vehicle. In 2004, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA),10 the US military’s main research organization, jump-started the development of the self-driving car by establishing the Grand Challenge. This groundbreaking competition teamed researchers from universities such as Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT with major industry players (including, among others, General Motors (GM) and Volkswagen) to realize ambitious concepts as working prototypes that could compete in a road race. The challenge, however, proved too great, and none of the driverless vehicles completed the 150-mile course through the Mojave Desert. The farthest any one of the prototypes was able to travel was 7.3 miles. The leading vehicle failed to negotiate a turn, got marooned on a rock, and threw in the towel. The $1 million cash prize was not awarded that year.
In 2005, Congress upped the ante by doubling the prize to $2 million to further encourage Grand Challenge competitors. The results were encouraging. Five cars, led by teams from Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, successfully navigated the entire 132-mile course—which featured narrow tunnels, winding mountain passes, and more than one hundred turns. After these two challenges, Google took the lead in the driverless-car crusade, building on the Challenge prototypes to develop the first fully functional, street-legal vehicles. In 2007, Google hired Sebastian Thrun—who had led the development of Stanford’s Grand Challenge Champion robotic vehicle in 2005—and other engineers from his team. DARPA’s Grand Challenge continued and, in 2007, moved out of the desert onto a 60-mile urban course.
It was not until 2011, however—after intense lobbying from Google—that the state of Nevada enacted legislation legalizing the operation of autonomous cars on public roads. In 2012, the states of Florida and California followed suit. Since then, Google’s fleet of twelve test vehicles has driven more than 800,000 miles, negotiating heavy traffic, hairpin turns, and the vertiginous hills of San Francisco, without causing an accident. There are still problems to overcome, however, including responding to traffic signals and driving on snow-slick streets.
Google is poised to radically change
how we think about cars on our roads. In a May 2014 interview with the New York Times,11 Christopher Urmson, the leader of Google’s autonomous car project, said the company had, as its initial priority, designed, from the ground up, an electric car without a steering wheel for urban and suburban use only—not for highways—with a maximum speed of 25 miles per hour. The cars navigate using advanced radar and sensors with a 360-degree, 600-foot range. The passenger selects a destination through a mobile app, and the car—which complies with all US federal and state regulations—sets off.
As we’ve seen, brainsharing has been essential in the development of the smart car. Government agencies, academic institutions, automotive and technology companies have all collaborated to provide capital, the latest technologies (sensors and radars, chips, wireless instruments, high-performance electric engines), and the cooperation and willpower to bring the smart, driverless car closer to reality.
As these models develop, and new ones emerge, it is likely the vehicles involved will share one important characteristic: they will be electrically powered. Tesla is best known for that assertion. Tesla’s all-electric car has made waves throughout the industry and around the world. It has set up free supercharging stations around the United States, and the company has announced it will build four hundred such stations in China over the next few years to boost its lackluster sales in Asia.12 In European countries—including Denmark, Sweden, and Holland—electric vehicle infrastructures in and around metropolitan areas are also expanding. After many years of trying to build enthusiasm for their electric vehicles, the major carmakers are now gaining traction with the electric models. Google’s self-driving car is powered by electricity and, not to be left behind, Apple has committed huge resources (involving a team that is being staffed up with 1,000 engineers) to building its own electric, self- driving car.13 The car of the future is almost certainly electric.
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